Placing a reform of the Criminal Procedure Law within a decree whose main issues are the updating of pensions, social aid to the most needy and various tax reductions is more than reckless. It is a mistake, in the current legislature.
Pedro Sánchez and his people know how to take trams, but it seems that they don't know how to drive buses. Readers will surely remember the guirigay of the end of 2022. That articulated legislative package that carried in its saddlebags a problematic reform of the Penal Code to mitigate the crime of embezzlement in some cases, plus a regulatory modification to expedite the renewal of the Constitutional Court, along with other matters of a very diverse nature. Sánchez wanted to get rid of a few difficult issues, to start 2023 very focused on the European agenda and the preparation of the local elections on May 28. He arrived in January with a monumental fight that complicated his approach to May. The local elections went very badly and he had to advance the general elections to July. He miraculously saved the general elections, thanks to the stubborn errors of the Spanish right, he managed the European semester as best he could and knew how to get on the investiture tram.
Sánchez knew that the Junts tram would only pass the Amnesty station once. Carles Puigdemont also knew that the Amnesty tram would only stop once in Waterloo. They both went up.
Emulating last year's movement, the Government wanted to clear January 2024 with a bus full to the brim. The trick is known: if the decree is not validated by Congress, everything falls.
Clear January to energetically face the February elections in Galicia in which the Popular Party, starting as the favorite, may have problems if it slips on the millions of plastic balls that are piling up on Galician beaches. That was the plan, which can go wrong today.
The PSOE is the champion of cunning in Spain. It is the party that has governed the longest since the restoration of democracy, demonstrating great elasticity and a notable capacity for pact. And an enviable internal unity. Aware of their abilities, they sometimes go overboard.
This time they have loaded the bus as if nothing had happened in July. “They will not dare to vote against the increase in pensions.” Mistake. The parliamentary majority is different today, much tighter and conditioned by two sleepless struggles: the struggle that has pitted ERC against the eternal convergent gene for more than a decade, and the bitter duel between Yolanda Díaz and the leading group of Podemos, which It will end badly for the entire left.
Junts will tighten the rope of Congress as much as it can so that ERC, with management problems in the Generalitat, appears in Catalonia as the soft party. Podemos wants to show that they have been left for dead before their time. Vice President María Jesús Montero is risking her bus driver's license.
[The Government will survive today's vote. More serious is the North American pressure for the operation in the Red Sea. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States has just called the Chief of Defense Staff to ask that Spain get involved. Plastic pellets are not fired in Bab el Mandeb].
