The only concrete agreement with an established date reached by the President of the Government and Secretary General of the PSOE, Pedro Sánchez, and the leader of the PP. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in the meeting held on December 22 in Congress, in the midst of a climate of maximum hostility between both parties, was to reform article 49 of the Constitution to eliminate the term handicapped and replace it with people with disabilities and update the protection of the rights of people with disabilities, and register this reform in the Lower House before the end of the year. And with that objective, the teams from both groups, led by the Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Cortes and Justice, Félix Bolaños, on the socialist side, and the general secretary of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, on the socialist side, got to work. popular.
The fruit of these negotiations arrived yesterday afternoon, speeding up the time that the two parties had given each other, with the registration of the bill in the Lower House, which provides for a law on disability, with the signature of the parliamentary groups socialist and popular and with the request for its processing through the urgency and single reading procedure, as agreed by Sánchez and Feijóo.
This was announced in an identical statement by both groups, who want the bill to be taken into consideration and voted on in a monographic plenary session in January, with that only point of the day, and therefore not pass through a parliamentary committee, thus expediting the procedure. In this way, the reform will be definitively approved in January and its entry into force would occur, as in previous constitutional reforms, on the same day as the publication of its text in the BOE.
The PSOE and the PP will only include amendments if both parties give their approval, and have agreed that they will not accept a referendum on the reform, something that has not been proposed by any parliamentary group for the moment for an issue that generates a great social consensus. and political. In any case, 35 deputies or 27 senators would be needed to force the consultation, figures that are not enough for all the nationalist or independence parties added to the five deputies from Podemos that split from Sumar who joined the mixed group.
In this sense, Feijóo, after confirming the final agreement, celebrated this Friday that the reform “means paying a debt with almost 10% of the population” that represents “the world of disabilities”, although he asked the Government’s partners to commit to not to use “the world of disabilities in a perverse way to raise a referendum or questions other than what article 49 indicates.”
The text, also agreed upon with the Spanish Committee of Representatives of People with Disabilities (Cermi), has two points. In its first section, it establishes: “People with disabilities exercise the rights provided for in this Title under conditions of real and effective freedom and equality. The special protection necessary for said exercise will be regulated by law.” And in its second section it states: “Public powers will promote policies that guarantee the full personal autonomy and social inclusion of people with disabilities, in universally accessible environments. Likewise, they will encourage the participation of their organizations, in the terms established by law. establish. The specific needs of women and minors with disabilities will be particularly addressed.”