The Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, proclaimed last March in the Parliament his determination to present before the end of the year the new preliminary draft of the Generalitat police law, a regulation intended to update the "obsolete" one - all agree those involved – current law of 1994, which establishes the principles of action, functions and the functional and statutory regime of the body. He is not the first Minister of the Interior to propose it, but the political circumstances, the electoral calendar and the results of the police model commission will frustrate his plan.
Although the draft of the law of the Police System of Catalonia has been ready since the summer, in the Ministry they leave the calendar on hold. The norm will not see the light of day within the expected period and it remains to be seen if it will be approved after the municipal elections in May. In fact, the main Mossos union has not yet been consulted, nor with town halls, nor with other actors involved in the field of security; only with some parties, which have already expressed their reluctance. This is where Elena's wish collides with reality.
"We analyze what is the best time to approve the law", to do it "away from partisan or electoral optics", they explain in Interior, where they prioritize achieving a "broad consensus" and say they are aware of "parliamentary arithmetic" and "sufflé ” electoral that will be in January.
The size of the company and the political context may mean that Elena's attempt ends like that of her predecessors. There have been many industry ministers who have proposed to renew the law. Since the time of the tripartite, with Montserrat Tura at the helm of Interior; passing through the stage of Felip Puig, that of Jordi Jané or Miquel Buch, among others. The unions count up to seven draft bills that, for one reason or another, have remained in the drawer.
And it is that updating the Mossos law is not easy, it requires reaching an agreement with the local world, the unions, and the rest of the sectors in the field of security, and one of the sections that the regulation wanted to deal with in more detail , the one related to public order, has come across the poor results of the police model commission, which has just finished its work.
Elena promised to include in the new law the conclusions of the commission, promoted with the CUP, convinced that her idea of creating an external control authority for the Mossos would go ahead. However, both this and the elimination of foam bullets, which are used by riot officers, and the idea of rotating officers from public order units fell on deaf ears. The Government once again experienced its parliamentary solitude in the commission and the Interior is now only considering "seeing to what extent they can be incorporated into the final text".
In addition, the political assets that Minister Elena had in March are not those of now. At that time, it had the support of Junts, still in the Government, and the complicity in police matters of the CUP, but the house of cards has collapsed to such an extent that the agreement with the anti-capitalists for the investiture of Pere Aragonès has turned out to be a bad deal for the president.
Neither PSC nor Junts, the other two majority groups in the Chamber, without which it would be impossible for the norm to prosper, compromise their endorsement. In fact, they are responsible for the disapproval in Parliament of the ERC minister.
The Socialists consider that this is not the time, at the gates of the municipal elections and with a content that will surely not be to their liking due to the political seal that Elena wants to impose. The PSC has supported the Mossos, while the Government has suffered successive clashes with the body. The first, after the serious vandalism at La Mercè in 2021 – they caused one death and dozens of arrests – when thirteen police unions confronted the department for its “servitude” to the CUP and organized a joint protest. And recently, due to "the growing politicization of the body" as a result of the replacement of the chief commissioner Josep Maria Estela by Eduard Sallent.
Junts is also reticent. After his departure from the Government, Puigdemont's formation tries to accommodate itself in his opposition role and has played a decisive role in the disapproval of Elena and in the failure of the most compromised decisions of the commission of the police model. In the party they believe that the Government will not dare to approve it and that is why they challenge it: "It is the one who should take the initiative."
