After the president of Castilla-La Mancha, the socialist Emiliano García-Page, cried out yesterday against the reform of the crime of embezzlement promoted by Pedro Sánchez to complete the "dejudicialization" of the political conflict in Catalonia - "it is not tolerable to agree with the criminals their own sentence", he rejected -, today it was the president of Aragon, the also socialist Javier Lambán, who has expressed his total opposition to this revision of the Criminal Code, in addition to urging to "rearm" the State before the self-determination referendum that the leader of Esquerra, Oriol Junqueras, puts back on the table, without even refusing to resume the unilateral path.
"The State, in the face of the separatist attempts of the independentistas, not only must not disarm but must rearm," Lambán demanded, during the act that he staged in Alcañiz. "Because seeing what has recently been said by the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, to propose a referendum, one comes to the conclusion that the independentistas have a clear roadmap in terms of advancing in the process of disconnecting Catalonia from Spain. All Spanish democrats and all supporters of the Constitution must consider it as an absolute priority ”, he warned. And, in a veiled summons to the Popular Party, he has called to achieve by all means that "the governability of the country does not depend on the extremes, neither on the independentistas nor on the extremists of any ideological orientation."
Lambán has pointed out, regarding the words of Junqueras, that "the declarations of the independentistas always seem unfortunate to me with respect to the idea that I have of Spain and of democracy, and in many cases they border on provocation, not to say that they are directly provocative. "That seems to me one of them," he warned. It should not be forgotten that Junqueras put the idea of a self-determination referendum back on the table just after the PSOE agreed with ERC on the scope of the review of the crime of embezzlement. "I will radically oppose any referendum in Catalonia, outside of those currently contemplated by current legislation," he stressed.
The leader of the Aragonese socialists has reiterated his opposition to the "reduction" of the crime of embezzlement, "with all clarity and emphatic." "Embezzling public funds to finance the commission of a crime as serious as the one committed by the Catalan separatists in October 2017, far from having any kind of mitigating consideration, should precisely have an aggravated consideration," Lambán assured. "Embezzlement to finance those very serious acts against the Constitution should receive even aggravated criminal treatment compared to what existed previously," he insisted.
Lambán, who, like Page, faces his re-election as regional president in the elections on May 28 in just five months, has warned that he does not like "to contribute to the noise that is currently invading Spanish politics." But he has argued that as president of Aragon he owes himself to his citizens, "who have the right to know what I think." In addition, he has assured that many of them have demanded that he express his position on the matter.
The bill for the reform of the Criminal Code will be voted on this Thursday in Congress, and an absolute majority is already on track to move forward, with the votes of the PSOE, Unidas Podemos, ERC and the PNV, among other groups. But Lambán, despite his rejection of this initiative, has indicated that he cannot order the Aragonese socialist deputies to vote against. "I am not the political leader of the Aragonese deputies in Congress, who will abide by what the group's leadership decides," he alleged. And he has considered "reprehensible" that the PP encourages the deputies of the PSOE to break the voting discipline.
