President Sánchez has announced the reform of the Criminal Code to eliminate the crime of sedition at the proposal of the parliamentary groups of the PSOE and Podemos, to dribble the request for mandatory reports to the Council of State and the General Council of the Judiciary. “It will be an initiative that helps to ease the situation in Catalonia”, he said; and “I understand that there are Spaniards who have doubts”, he added. Thus, the crime of sedition, punishable by up to 15 years and applied to the leaders of the procés (13 years), will disappear, to be replaced by aggravated public disorder, punishable by up to five years. This reduces the penalties applicable to escaped leaders and the disqualification of those pardoned. In addition, the Government supports, at the request of Esquerra, a downward reform of embezzlement when the direct enrichment of the convicted person is not proven. In this way, the only crime that still affects those convicted of the process is alleviated, accelerating the return to politics of Oriol Junqueras.
The reaction in Catalonia has been positive, although President Aragonès has considered it just one step, so others will have to be taken to remove the Catalan political conflict from justice. “With the repeal of sedition, it is more difficult to arbitrarily persecute independence,” he celebrated. And he added that “we will continue working to build new agreements that contribute to achieving the complete de-judicialization of the conflict”, making it clear that this reform is the result of an agreement between the PSOE-PSC and ERC.
Esquerra’s joy is logical: it has fully triumphed, because there are two essential demands –amnesty and self-determination– and it has achieved the first, albeit obliquely. In law, what are not effects is literature, and the combined effects of the pardons (which I considered convenient at the time), the suppression of sedition and the downward reform of embezzlement are so close to amnesty that they almost are equivalent to it. Therefore, to another goal: self-determination. Because many things can be blamed on the independentistas, but not that they hide what they want: a referendum on self-determination. Can they do it? Yes like? Let’s see.
The outcome of the next general elections will be decisive. If a result similar to the current one is repeated, Sánchez will form a new coalition government with the radical left and the parliamentary support of the independentistas and the taifas. Sánchez is a good tactician, with extreme coldness, hardness and ease, placed at the service of a project that does not end personally (retaining power), but connects with a good part of the young, grandchildren of the transition , who are sentimentally far from her and are committed to a profound constitutional change.
It is the new left. It is another PSOE. That being the case, the moment of truth will have arrived. The independentistas, already “amnestied”, will demand their self-determination and Sánchez will agree with them on a referendum. The result of the consultation only God knows, but in any case it will mean the end of Spain as the historical entity and the political project that we know today. What had to happen will have happened: the alliance between socialists and independentistas, born in the thirties of the last century with the San Sebastián pact, will have deployed all its strength. There is no nation or state that will resist an independence attack if the left assumes it.
It will already be difficult to consolidate a plural Spain conceived as a sphere of solidarity defined by geography and history. It is true that there are many causes and various responsible parties that have contributed to this end, but it will be the left that will consummate it, now understanding -according to its intelligentsia- that in the autumn of 2017 there was only a constitutional crisis in which both the independentistas Like the Government, they acted with the same contempt for democracy, which is why the pardon and the current penal reforms only amend the serious errors of that time. We are passing the point of no return, but, like so many times in history, contemporaries do not see it.
