The amnesty made Pedro Sánchez president. And the amnesty, two months after the inauguration, keeps the Government in suspense: judicial pressure from outside, with orders from judges Manuel García Castellón and Joaquín Aguirre, who warn of how they are going to play the political game in the courts; the pressure from Junts, which distrusts the judicial application of the amnesty law, which fears that it will remain watered down; and the PSOE’s own decision not to accept the amendments of the Catalan independentists on terrorism.
The names of the magistrates were mentioned in the Congress rostrum several times: Junts’ own spokesperson, Míriam Nogueras, cited them. As well as that of Podemos, Martina Velarde. And others, without giving their names, had “lawfare” present in their speeches, such as Gerardo Pisarello (Sumar), Jon Iñarritu (EH Bildu) or Pilar Vallugera (ERC).
“The bull returns to the pigsties,” said a person familiar with the negotiations at 3:00 p.m. sharp. Just when the debate was going to begin, with the intervention of the PNV spokesperson, Mikel Legarda. And what did that mean? “That he returns to the commission,” that time had run out without a transactional agreement. And so it was, more than three hours later, when the result of the vote was known. The 179 noes compared to 171 yeses resulting from Junts’ rejection overturned the amnesty law and returned the text to the Justice Commission, since the pertinent opinion had been approved, and, incidentally, left the Government in the air in a legislature that has just started in fits and starts, after having approved on the edge the votes for the presidency of Congress, the investiture itself and the anti-crisis decrees – the abstention of Junts that day saved two, although the third fell due to no from Podemos to Work.
But this time it went from shock to defeat.
The same law that made the Government possible – its promise – leaves it in suspense. “If the PSOE does not vote for us on the Junts-PNV transaction, we will vote against,” said sources from the pro-independence party on Tuesday morning: the party executive had decided not to vote on the law if the amendments that arrived alive at the plenary session were not passed. thanks to the support of Basque nationalists. They were amendments that had to do with what has been called the “perimeter of the amnesty” since October. That is, who enters and who stays out, and that has a lot to do with the use that judges can make of criminal figures such as terrorism.
In the end, the amendments presented by Junts and PNV fell, with the votes of PSOE, PP and Vox. And then the law, by no from Together. “We have warned about it from day one,” Junts sources said: “There are many people who would be left out. And they would put many more in, because they would have seen the hole.”
“We are not terrorists,” Junts spokesperson Míriam Nogueras claimed on the platform. And ex-president Carles Puigdemont explained on X (before Twitter): “We could not support a bill that has important deficiencies that have not been corrected; Had it had our favorable vote, it would have invalidated the commitment to a comprehensive, complete amnesty, without exclusions. A commitment that we agreed upon for the investiture of President Pedro Sánchez. There is only one way to stop his patriotic impulse: to make a more solid law, without so many loopholes. We have a few days to rebuild the initial consensus, which I do not doubt, that the amnesty must include everyone persecuted by this machinery of breaking fundamental rights that has become – for pro-independence Catalans – the Spanish judiciary.”
In this sense, Sumar deputy Gerardo Pisarello (Comuns) charged against the judges who have “begun to see retrospective terrorism everywhere,” but he also defended the vote in favor of the amnesty law.
“It is curious that there is a judge from the National Court who did not see the involvement of María Dolores de Cospedal in the Kitchen case despite more than 270 mentions in the Villarejo case (…) but was so diligent as to find evidence against We can or have begun to see retrospective terrorism everywhere,” he said: “For four years the cause against Tsunami was sleeping the sleep of the just. The problem is that of a reactionary bloc that, in order to govern, is always capable of anything: spying, making false reports, outlawing adversaries…”
For its part, from ERC, reports Arturo Puente, they considered it a “colossal error” that Junts has chosen not to approve the amnesty law this Tuesday. “We were counting on the PP to delay the procedures, not on Junts to do so,” explain sources from the party. Republicans predict that in the process that opens now, which may take up to a month, there may be some changes in the law, but far from substantial. “It is very difficult for us to improve the law through constant short haggling,” say the Republicans, which is why ERC were in favor of approving it this Tuesday, to the point that Oriol Junqueras was in the Congress gallery during the plenary session. .
The Podemos deputy Martina Velarde did support this Friday Junts’ position of including in the amnesty the crimes that some judges classify as terrorism. “We see that Judge García Castellón is dictating laws at the same pace as the law is being processed in order to avoid it,” he criticized during the debate on the amnesty law, which Podemos has supported: “We must introduce terrorism crimes into the law because There are judges who are trying to apply types of terrorism to facts that are not. We are at risk if the representatives or García Castellón rule.”
EH Bildu deputy Jon Iñarritu, a party that is part of the majority of the investiture, has also defended the amnesty law agreed by the Government with the pro-independence forces, attacking the arguments put forward by the PP: “You are the ones who have applied the most right of grace, to those who like it the most. “You have not pardoned people convicted of torture and state terrorism, you have pardoned people convicted of terrorism in the past.” Iñarritu added: “We cannot give the staunch enemies of this law opportunities or victories. The judicial, police and media extreme right is moving, and that is what is happening. “There is an attempt to overthrow the majority of the legislature.”
Those who did not hide their joy at the Government’s defeat in the vote were the PP deputies: if it went ahead, they used the story that “Sánchez pays to continue being president”; If he declined, as he did, they had the B side, to talk about “humiliation and indignity.”
In the morning, a PP deputy was dramatizing Jordi Turull’s “colorín colorado”, which was later used by Alberto Núñez Feijóo himself in an intervention that dealt with the arguments that he has been using practically since the election night of 23J, since he realized that he had lost the investiture. “There is only one of the two possible candidates willing to do what you order,” he questioned Nogueras, when Feijóo himself knows very well that if he promised an amnesty law he would not have the votes of Vox, so the seven of Junts, in the hypothetical case that he won them, they would be very insufficient for his investiture. Feijóo also insisted on the hoax about how Puigdemont left Spain: “he left in a trunk and will return in a falcon.”
But Feijóo knows, although he does not say it, that Sánchez could not call elections until a year after the dissolution of the Cortes, which occurred on May 30 – meaning they would be held, again, at the end of July. And, also, that the President of the Government, at the moment, does not have many incentives either, looking at the polls.
“Sometimes you feel like an army in a Russian winter,” said a deputy from the investiture majority in the Congress courtyard about the fronts with which the Executive has to deal: “Fighting with the cold, the snow and the mud . Let us remember that in this country some puppeteers accused of terrorism were put in jail.” Another added: “I don’t know what this legislature is going to be like, because no one assures you that in a month, when the law returns, what will have happened. There may have already been Galician elections, and you don’t know if the scenario will be better. And if Junts is using it to put pressure on the budgets… the Government can extend last year’s budgets and that’s it.”
Shortly before 5:45 p.m., the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, entered the chamber to vote. His spokesperson in the debate, Francisco Aranda, had defended the bill as a result of “dialogue within the law”, while winking at the judiciary: “To defend this chamber and this parliament we do not even need to disqualify the Judiciary “or get into personal issues.”
The Minister of the Presidency and Justice himself, Félix Bolaños, insisted on “opening a new stage in Catalonia” while stating that “Spain is a State of law, with judges who act professionally and with rigor.”
Bolaños spoke like this shortly before flying to Brussels late in the afternoon on the same plane as Esteban González Pons, with whom he will meet together with the Commissioner of Justice, Didier Reynders, to address the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary that he has been blocking. the Popular Party for more than five years.
Meanwhile, the Government, the investiture and the amnesty law remained up in the air, after a plenary session that has demonstrated the fragility of the legislative majority, the need to reach Congress with the votes tied and the decisiveness of each vote, in this case, of the seven Junts deputies.
Source: www.eldiario.es
