Spain Notes, Nov 6: Vox says it's a coup
1/ Monday morning, and the politicians are ready for a fight again after a weekend break. The PP “must assume its role in the opposition”, said Sumar spokesman Urtasun, “they don’t have a mandate from the ballot box and they must stop with their anti-democratic attitudes”.
2/ Actually, they don’t take a break on weekends, do they, it’s constant bickering and sniping. Urtasun was referring to a PP rally yesterday in Valencia at which Feijóo said Sánchez would have to go to new elections and that “Spain will continue to exist and the PSOE will go to nothing”.
3/ The socialist First Minister of Asturias, Barbón, and the Vox Deputy First Minister of Castilla y León, García-Gallardo, are scrapping on Twitter. “You are a traitor to your land”, spat García-Gallardo, “like all the socialists who haven’t yet burnt their PSOE membership cards”. Barbón is now demanding the PP First Minister disavow the Vox man.
4/ Spain’s Social Rights Minister, Belarra (Sumar, Podemos) said: “In Spain, our grandfathers and grandmothers know this very well, because they paid a high price with exile and death. They know very well what it means for the international community to leave you stranded. Let's not do the same to Palestine”.
5/ Podemos is going to make an attempt to unhook itself from Sumar. I don’t know how they’re going to do that at this stage, given their leaders are Sumar MPs, having run for the general election on the Sumar electoral lists.
6/ Vox’s Abascal said the amensty deal was “a coup” and that they will be filing criminal charges against Sánchez for bribery and against the members of the Speaker’s Committee in Congress for abuse of authority for allowing the “flagrantly unconstitutional” amnesty bill to start its passage through parliament.
7/ Last minute amnesty deal negotiations are ongoing today between the PSOE and Puigdemont in Brussels.
8/ El País writes in its editorial today that judges should stay out of the amnesty law debate until parliament has seen fit to pass it (or not). That is the proper order of things in a democracy, parliament makes the laws, judges implement them.
9/ El Mundo says the new Sánchez premiership will be full of “permanent blackmail” from Catalan separatists, and that Catalan separatism as a movement will receive new energy from all of this.
10/ ABC has done a poll on the amnesty and reckons almost half of socialist voters reject it, as well as more than 60% of Spaniards across the board: “The rule of law will clearly lose out when this unheard of amnesty proclaims the annihilation of the constitutional principle of the equality of all citizens before the law, a backbone of any democracy”.
11/ A poll in El País shows the left losing ground slightly since the general election in July, but still no overall majority on the right either.
12/ A poll in El Mundo suggests something similar: the right doing a bit better but still not enough.
13/ Both polls also suggest Vox is falling further.
14/ The former PP First Minister of Madrid, Aguirre, says she went to the protest outside Socialist Party HQ the other night because the amnesty deal means “the end of the rule of law, of the separation of powers”. She says she’ll go to the others, too.
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