Irene Montero, on the law of 'only yes is yes': "Consent is not touched"

Irene Montero assured this Sunday that, although she is willing to reform the ‘only yes is yes’ law, as the PSOE has asked her, there is something in which she will not give in under any circumstances: “Consent is not touched”. The Minister for Equality reiterated her position during the act ‘Did you consent or not? Only yes is yes ‘organized by her party, Podemos.

“Although we know that the law is fine and that no legal reform is going to avoid these judicial decisions to reduce the sentences, we are willing to reform the law, to accept the conditions that the majority partner of the government needs to come out united to face it, as a government, to this offensive against the law and against the coalition government”, said Montero.

At the same time, he warned that “what we are not going to give in to” is the right that feminists have won in the streets. “Consent is not touched,” she assured.

The act at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid was also attended by the leader of the purple party, the Minister of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, Ione Belarra. She addressed “to all those who want us to get tired” to tell them that “we are not going to give up.” “We are going to fight to defend all feminist advances.”

The latest Justice proposal, sent on Friday, is, according to Equality sources, even worse than previous ones due to its wording on violence and intimidation, which pivots on these the type of crime for which the sexual aggressor is convicted, withdrawing it of consent, in which the department directed by Irene Montero wants to place it, equaling the previous crimes of abuse and aggression. In Podemos they see the head of Justice, Pilar Llop, committed to that return to the previous model.

Belarra did not mention the PSOE at any time in his speech, but he seemed to refer to it when warning those who “want us to get tired” that Podemos is not going to give up in its defense of consent.

He did attack the PP, which has already registered a bill to return to the distinction between abuse and aggression. He assured that the sentence reductions are “an excuse that the PP has used to return to the model of violence and intimidation”, and that he does not care about the victims because when he governed he cut funds against gender violence and now he opens “the doors of governability to the denialist ultra-right”. For this reason, he said not to accept from the popular “not even half a lesson because they have no credibility.”

Mentioning the “judicial coup” that in his opinion meant that the Constitutional Court suspended the processing of the amendments on its reform incorporated into the reform of the Penal Code to repeal sedition and distinguish different types of embezzlement, Belarra established a parallelism with the reductions of penalties for violators, for which Podemos blames the courts, that “Congress and the democratic majorities make the laws and the judges apply them, they do not twist them.”

Next, the leader of Podemos interpreted that of all this alleged offensive against the law “the objective is for us to surrender”, and in this sense, she stated that today’s act is “to tell all those who want us to get tired not to we are going to give up, we are going to fight to defend all the feminist advances of this government”.

Ione Belarra criticized that the “billionaires” and “obscene” benefits of Banco Santander and BBVA reveal that their presidents are not businessmen but “loan sharks” and “greedy”, to return to vindicate the need to deploy their proposal to stop variable-rate mortgages due to rising interest rates. “They are making gold and swimming in 500-euro bills.”

The minister stressed that since she described the owner of Mercadona, Juan Roig, as a “ruthless capitalist” and also claimed to cap the price of food at levels prior to the war in Ukraine, there are people who have since said that “the rich are not can be named.” Faced with this, she claimed that Podemos will continue to point out that “wealth” in Spain has names and surnames and that if you earn 6,000 or 9,000 million euros, you are not an entrepreneur, but a “usurer”.