Alberto Núñez Feijóo made equality, as a battering ram against the amnesty, his main axis in the investiture session. But there are many examples that he has not always been so sensitive in defending such a laudable desire.
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The main axis of Alberto Núñez Feijóo's intervention in this week's investiture debate was the amnesty that a future Pedro Sánchez Government could approve. He charged against it, considering it the beginning of the dissolution of Spain with the argument that it would break the equality of all citizens, which in turn would break the foundations of the rule of law. Equality, a word that the leader of the PP pronounced up to twenty times.
He did not specify what he meant by such; He used the concept in an abstract, absolute way, a forceful idea that is almost impossible to oppose. Like justice or freedom. Who does not consider them laudable and necessary aspirations?
He ended up applying the concept/label to many fields, from economics to education. But above all, the leader of the PP wanted to refer to equality before the law, that is, the right of all citizens to receive identical treatment from justice. The obvious message from the Galician politician is that the amnesty for the independence leaders means erasing a crime, something that would not be available to the rest of the citizens. Blatant inequality. We will leave aside that justice, to be such, must also know how to apply, adapting to the circumstances and seeking to solve problems, not aggravate them. That is, unequal duty to know when it operates for the benefit of society.
In these weeks of intense debate on the amnesty, previous examples have already been brought up. For example, the tax amnesty of the Government of Mariano Rajoy, in 2012. In addition to showing that others before Sánchez made comparable decisions, the reference serves to go beyond its validity as a precedent. Precisely from the angle of equality so strongly defended by Feijóo.
By definition, tax amnesty has much more difficult justification than politics. From the outset, it itself is the child of inequality (in this case economic): several tens of thousands of taxpayers, who are assumed to already have the status of privileged for having a large income or assets, receive the additional reward of bringing them to light (and with them their tax crimes) with hardly any economic cost and of course with complete criminal money laundering.
In clear contrast to the majority of citizens whom the Tax Agency has controlled thanks to their payrolls. A difference in treatment compared to those who were able to regularize without major problems. With the bitter added bonus that many of them also turned out to be protagonists of many other violations of the penal code, especially those related to political corruption.
No one will remember Feijóo raising his voice against his fellow Government members in the face of such staining of equality. Did Rajoy's Government do it to help his friends, as the opposition accused? Or was it because the State urgently needed income to face the economic crisis, as the Government and the PP said?
There are also similar actions in the PSOE mandates. And without having to go back to the tax amnesties of the mid-eighties of the last century, of the first Government of Felipe González, now so critical of that type of measures. We are talking about something much more recent, with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, 2010 and Elena Salgado being Minister of Finance. Something noteworthy happened in the circumstances of the current political debate. The ministry received a list of almost 700 Spanish residents holding bank accounts in Switzerland, at the HSBC bank, the famous “Falciani list.” It included some of the most distinguished representatives of the country's economic and financial elite.
But the Treasury, instead of ordering inspections and reporting these possible fraudsters to the courts, decided to send them polite requests to regularize their situation. They did it, fines and, above all, criminal accusations were avoided.
Again, a clear contrast with the situation of the majority of taxpayers, who have never enjoyed such benign treatment. When the Tax Agency detects something irregular, it opens an inspection and if in the end the existence of the crime emerges, it sends the complaint to the Prosecutor's Office. Did the Government do it to protect its friends, as the PP said - by the way, not at the time of the events, but years later, when they were already in the Government and the socialists accused them of the same thing for the tax amnesty? by Cristóbal Montoro? To avoid a clash with a large sector of the country's economic elite? Why did he fear that the justice system would take him to task for the way in which he had obtained the HSBC lists, as Zapatero's executive said at the time?
The existence of the Basque and Navarrese provincial regime, undoubtedly politically legitimate, is another example of this inequality, in this case of citizens and territories, which Feijóo also did not include in his inflamed intervention in Congress. In his desire to be extremely concerned about equality, he rightly remembered the problems suffered by many people in rural areas with more difficult access to basic services.
But he did not mention the inequality with taxes in force for almost two decades, from the time of Esperanza Aguirre to that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, between some privileged residents of the Community of Madrid and those of the rest of the State. And this thanks to discrimination, that is, inequality, between a community that benefits from its status as capital and the rest. It seems that for some this inequality is an absolute that, however, ends up being relative depending on who it affects.
