In a new display of strength that has allowed it to lengthen and speed up the deadlines depending on the political calendar, the majority of the PP has once again imposed itself today, as it did last Tuesday in the presentation of the report of the presentation, and has approved in the joint Constitutional and Justice commission the veto of the Amnesty law presented by the popular group, which will be voted and sanctioned in the plenary session on the 14th so that Congress, foreseeably the last week of May, will lift it in a new vote and definitively enter into force.
With 18 votes in favor of the PP and Vox, which has seen its own veto proposal rejected, and the 14 votes of the remaining groups represented in the commission, and without any abstention, the veto has subsequently gone ahead. of an hour and a half debate in which the senators have reiterated the positions of their political formations, which will be presented, once again, next week in plenary session.
The amnesty is “obscenely unconstitutional”, has denounced the popular senator Antonio Silván, who has outlined the arguments that the PP has been using since the beginning of the processing of the law and which, as he recalled, are the same ones that the PSOE raised. to reject it before needing the seven votes of Junts for Pedro Sánchez to be sworn in again as president of the Government.
The amnesty is a “covert constitutional reform,” stated Silván, who has accused the PSOE of promoting it out of “opportunity and convenience” despite the violation of fundamental principles, the breakdown of the separation of powers, the fracture of equality between citizens and the bankruptcy of legal security that, according to the PP, it entails.
From the opposite pole, the socialist senator Antonio Magdaleno has pointed out that the veto represents the “failure” of the PP, to which he has attributed the greatest responsibility for the independence process in Catalonia, and has insisted that the Constitution does not prohibit amnesty, an initiative policy that culminates, as he has defended, the reconciliation between Catalans after the two illegal referendums and the unilateral declaration of independence that occurred with a conservative government.
His fellow member José María Oleaga has been more vehement, arousing discomfort among the popular senators by remembering the demonstrations against the amnesty law in front of the PSOE headquarters on Ferraz Street promoted by the opposition, in which there were “aggressions” against socialist militants, and the attacks that Pedro Sánchez received by some members of the PP, who spoke of “a shot in the back of the head” or wished “that a sniper would hit him.”
“Intolerable!” the PP senators have exclaimed in response to these accusations by Oleaga, who has attributed these outbursts to popular councilors without identifying them. He has, however, pointed out the PP spokesperson in Congress, Miguel Tellado, as a participant in that “inconceivable tension” when he said that Sánchez should leave Spain “in the trunk of a car,” just as it is often said that he did. Carles Puigdemont in 2017.
Both ERC, through Senator Joan Josep Queralt, and Junts, represented by Josep Lluís Cleries, have defended that the amnesty represents an “amendment to the entire repression that Catalonia has suffered” and have accused the PP, along with Vox, to promote the “persecution” against the independence movement. And they have assured, with different nuances, that this law allows us to leave behind the “judicialization of politics” and open a new stage.
For their part, senators Uxue Barkos (Geroa Bai) and Igotz López Torre (PNV), in a very technical intervention, have accused the PP of incurring “procedural anomalies” in the processing of the presentation in order to delay its passage through the Senate and have argued that it is the Constitutional Court that must decide whether the amnesty complies with legality, while everything else is “opinions without legal consequences.”
