Spain Notes, Nov 13: amnesty tensions rise
Confidence debate in Sánchez this week. Amnesty bill to be registered in parliament this morning. Vox to seek Supreme Court injunction to stop debate.
1/ Hundreds of thousands, or perhaps up to two million people (Spain population: 47 million) protested on Sunday in combined PP-Vox demonstrations in major cities across the country against the Sánchez-Puigdemont amnesty deal.
(I went along to the ones in Murcia to see the difference. Will explain more in comment posts for you. Photo above of holed Spanish flag, without the coat of arms, in protest over “the 1978 constitutional regime”)
2/ The Speaker of Congress, Armengol (PSOE), announced the date for the confidence vote in Sánchez: this Wednesday and Thursday, Nov 15-16.
3/ Deputy PM Yolanda Diaz (Sumar) said the amnesty bill would be formally tabled in parliament this morning.
4/ Vox has announced it will tomorrow file criminal charges against Sánchez at the Supreme Court and seek an injunction to stop the confidence debate going ahead.
5/ Police have increased restrictions in the streets around Congress.
6/ The First Minister of Asturias, Barbón (PSOE), said the demonstrations and tension he is seeing on Spanish streets this week remind him of the Jan 6. 2021 events in the Capitol in Washington DC.
7/ Some protestors in Madrid began intoning Hail Mary prayers against Sánchez and the amnesty deal. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death…”
8/ One chap explained that they were doing that because "Spain is Mary's land and blessed", "there are several signs that the end of times is near".
(2022: The worldview of Vox and the new global radical right in their own words. Is it all a normal traditional conservative reaction to the rise of the global left or a new xenophobic authoritarian Christian movement that wants to undo the global economic order?)
9/ Another small group, led by Gisbert, tried an “indefinite” tent protest outside Congress on Saturday night. It lasted a couple of hours and police carted Gisbert off.
10/The National High Court in Madrid opened a preliminary investigation into the shooting of the former leader of the PP in Catalonia, and Vox founder, Alejo Vidal Quadras, last week on a Madrid street, as a terrrorist attack.
11/ ABC: “a large number of liberal and conservative citizens, as well as progressives, are not ready to give up on all the advances since the Transition”.
12/ El Mundo: “No democratic leader, and Sánchez is one, can ignore such a large mobilisation”.
13/ El País: “The PSOE, Sumar and all their partners for the confidence vote would be wrong to ignore the social impact of these demonstrations, no matter how much the incendiary rhetoric of the leaders of the national rights is currently distorting any serious dialectical confrontation about the need and scope of the amnesty and of any of the other agreements reached”.
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