Tamames asks that "at least" end the sovereignist "overrepresentation".

In the last minute of his speech, the economist Ramón Tamames, taking for granted that the motion would not progress, asked Congress to "at least" end the supposed "overrepresentation" of pro-independence forces - and of autonomous parties or regionalists, who in the strict sense would enjoy the same presumed advantage -, as a way of correcting the course of the country.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
22 March 2023 Wednesday 00:54
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Tamames asks that "at least" end the sovereignist "overrepresentation".

In the last minute of his speech, the economist Ramón Tamames, taking for granted that the motion would not progress, asked Congress to "at least" end the supposed "overrepresentation" of pro-independence forces - and of autonomous parties or regionalists, who in the strict sense would enjoy the same presumed advantage -, as a way of correcting the course of the country. This is not the case, as Aitor Esteban and Íñigo Errejón, among others, reminded him: the Spanish constituencies overrepresent PP and PSOE at the expense of state parties that have less establishment, and it is the autonomous forces that suffer the least deviation of seats with respect to their percentage of votes in the State.

But it was neither the only falsehood nor the only myth that appeared in his speech, although he insisted on it so much at the beginning and at the end of his speech that he forgot or omitted to allude to the electoral advance which is supposed to have motivated the motion of no confidence. Among the commonplaces that led to his speech, he spoke of "the vexation and aversion shown to our language, which cannot be spoken even in Spain itself", he assured that the war in Ukraine was started by the States United and it will have to be finished by China, in the face of the EU's impotence. He said he wanted to talk little about the EU and he did. In fact, the European affair to which he devoted the most time was the Spanishness of Gibraltar.

Although he did not expressly mention the ultra theory of "replacement", he alluded to demography claiming an increase in the birth rate, because current rates turn Spain into a "decadent town", he said, and he expressly quoted the demographer Josep Antoni Vandellós, whose postulates, collected in the book Catalunya, poble decadent, warned of the decline of the "Catalan race" that would cause the avalanche of migration from other territories in Spain.

He assured that the law of Democratic Memory is not fair with the "atrocities committed by both sides" during the Civil War, harshly criticized the Second Republic and subscribed to the theory that the Asturias revolution of 1934 was the beginning of the Civil War. He also recovered the imperial interpretation of the Spanish invasion of America as more humanitarian than that of the British Empire in its colonies, and assured that the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlán was the genesis of "a twinning unique in the history of mankind".

He spoke a lot about the economy, recalling his position as State trade technician, an occupation that he himself defined - and this is how the chamber reminded him - as "the vanguard of the Spanish economy". To the surprise of the chamber, he claimed an ambitious public industrial policy while underestimating the ability of SMEs to drive the economy and called into question their future.

He accused Sánchez of "buying votes" in exchange for increasing student scholarships and criticized the labor policy of the Spanish Government, which he linked to that of the vertical unions of the Franco regime. But above all he had an impact on the agreements with Catalan and Basque separatists, which in his opinion put the integrity of Lanación at risk.