Pedro Sánchez is determined to culminate in this legislature the de-inflammation and disassembly, "piece by piece", of the political conflict in Catalonia that he received as a poisoned inheritance from Mariano Rajoy as soon as he assumed the presidency of the Government.
Together with the reactivation of the dialogue table to redirect the clash, in which Pere Aragonès renounced the unilateral path, the first major milestone in this roadmap for Sánchez was the granting of pardons, in June 2021, to the independence leaders imprisoned by the procés. The next step was the ongoing express reform of the Penal Code, registered last November in Congress by the PSOE and Unidas Podemos, to repeal the crime of sedition, for which these leaders were convicted, and its replacement by that of public disorder. aggravated. And the last step in the route of "dejudicialization" of the Catalan conflict, through an ERC amendment to this penal reform, may be a review of the crime of embezzlement that weighs on those convicted and accused of the 2017 independence process.
Sánchez, who never closed the door to this ERC claim despite the alarms in the PSOE, yesterday assumed a review of embezzlement, in line with the parliamentary processing of the bill to replace sedition with the crime of aggravated public disorder . The red line for this embezzlement reform, as he warned in an informal conversation with the press during the reception for Constitution Day, is that in no case will it mean "a setback" in the fight against political corruption nor will it imply a reduction of the penalties for these crimes.
The President of the Government summoned to wait for ERC to register the amendment planned for this purpose to the bill to reform the Penal Code, whose term expires next Friday. From that moment, the socialist group will set an official position on the matter.
That a reform of embezzlement does not imply tarnishing the fight against political corruption, which Sánchez wields as a sign of identity of his mandate, is precisely the caution that the PSOE and Podemos warned, as well as from other groups of the majority of the investiture – from the PNV and EH Bildu to Más País or Compromís – to tread carefully on this issue.
In the Government, however, they use "comparative law" and defend situating the crime of embezzlement in terms similar to the legal systems of France, Italy or Portugal. On this occasion, Germany would not be the example to follow, since it was precisely this model that inspired the hardening of embezzlement promoted by Rajoy in 2015.
This latest reform of the Popular Party to toughen the penalties against political corruption after the scandal of the Gürtel plot, according to socialist sources, would have typified the crime of embezzlement in a very generic way. So the claim would now be to delimit this criminal type with absolute precision. The Minister of Defense, Judge Margarita Robles, has already defended that the current regulation of the crime of embezzlement "is very unequal, because obviously the corrupt person who takes the money to his pocket is not the same as the one who does not take the money to his pocket".
In this same sense, the ERC spokesman in Congress, Gabriel Rufián, also defended a "surgical" reform of the crime of embezzlement, precisely to preserve the fight against political corruption.
Executive sources give as an example the case of a mayor who received European funds to invest in digitization projects, but used them to pay the salaries of municipal employees. According to the criteria that the Government is now considering, in this case it would not be a crime of political corruption. The key would therefore be in personal gain. But these sources point out that a reform of embezzlement in this sense would not affect the case of José Antonio Griñán, the former socialist president of the Junta de Andalucía who is pending imprisonment after his conviction for the fraudulent ERE case.
Sánchez, however, did not want to elaborate on the possible reform of the crime of embezzlement, waiting for ERC to register its amendment, at the latest, next Friday. For the President of the Government, in any case, his agenda for the recovery of "coexistence" in Catalonia will be a "political and electoral asset" of the PSOE in the imminent new electoral cycle. To begin with, Sánchez is convinced that the Socialists will once again be the leading political force in the municipal and regional elections next May.
The head of the Executive is scheduled to star in a rally next Sunday precisely in Barcelona, to vindicate his "service record" in Catalonia, as well as to support the candidate for mayor, Jaume Collboni.
The right, however, sees its worst fears confirmed. The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, warned that Sánchez is "a latent threat" to the Constitution. And he denounced that he is "subject to his pro-independence partners", but assured that "millions of socialist voters" will not allow themselves to be subjected - before a reform of the Penal Code "to the letter of the politicians convicted by the Supreme Court, so that they are exonerated from their sorrows”–, and that is how they will express it at the polls.
The PSOE leadership informed Joaquín Leguina yesterday of his expulsion as a militant for the support he attributes to the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, in the campaign for the regional elections in May 2021. Ferraz alleges that the file of Leguina – first president regional of Madrid and unique of the PSOE in this community in democracy – was processed "with all the guarantees for the member, who could claim everything he considered".
