Chronicle of a decline foretold. The Popular Party already announced it last week and kept its word: it voted this Wednesday with the Socialist Party to reject the drafting of the bill of concord that it had negotiated with Vox in Castile and León when the two parties governed in coalition. Of course, neither the regional president, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, nor his vice-president, nor his spokesperson, among other councilors, were present during the debate. Not even the spokesperson for the Popular Group, Ricardo Gavilanes, was present. They only returned to the Chamber after the intervention of Vox, the PSOE, the Mixed Group and the UPL, to listen to their spokesperson in the Agriculture Commission, Óscar Reguera Acevedo, who is the one who defended the PP’s position. Vox was left alone to defend this standard, which assimilated the victims of the Civil War and Francoism to other people murdered under the Second Republic and covered the period between 1931 and 1978.
The bill failed to condemn the Franco dictatorship and sought to prohibit the public dissemination of images, documents or any other material concerning the identity of anyone involved in the recovery process, including victims and their families. It also included victims of terrorism, but without specifying the period, and it renounced memorial associations because it considered that a “conflict of interest” would arise within the Exhumation Commission.
But the PP did not justify this rejection by the body of the text, defended by Fernández Mañueco months ago, but by the need for the bill to be reviewed by the Consultative Council, an autonomous institution that guarantees compliance with the entire legal system. In addition, the Popular Party accuses the PSOE and Vox of putting “a brake” on it for wanting to debate the bill that PP and Vox presented when they governed together.
Former regional vice-president and Vox spokesman in the Cortés, Juan García-Gallardo, described the PP’s position as “incomprehensible” and recalled that it governs in a minority. It was also asked why the leadership of Castilla y León (especially Mañueco and his advisor to the presidency) gave its favorable opinion to this rule and expressed “doubts.”
García-Gallardo, who presented this proposal, chose to “recover the embrace of the transition” and recalled “the horror of the civil war”, which “shocked the world” for its “cruelty”. It was also asked what happened before the conflict for the Catholic Church to “support” Franco or why the French and British did not intervene. “And why did Franco die with the affection of so many Spaniards?”, he asked the parliamentary chamber before denying that they intend to “recover the authoritarian regime” and then attack the two-party system that led “to this apparently democratic tyranny”.
A rule that wanted to repeal a PP decree
The Concordia bill, presented by PP and Vox, does not necessarily have to go through the Consultative, an organization that the former president of the Junta de Castilla y León Juan Vicente Herrera, who promoted the current decree on historical memory, wanted the bill to repeal. If the rule had been proposed by the Junta de Castilla y León, this control by the Consultative Council would have been necessary. The PSOE requested that the rule be reviewed by the Consultative Committee anyway, something that the PP supported in May – knowing that the casting vote of the president of the Cortés, of Vox, would avoid this procedure.
The Popular Group supported the Socialist Party’s request that this rule go through the Consultation – a procedure that is not mandatory – and that the president of the Autonomous Parliament Carlos Pollán rejected at the Table of the Cortés. And last week, at the Council of Spokespersons, this time the PP requested it to try to delay the processing of the norm while trying to negotiate the 2025 autonomous budgets. Having failed to get the Council to return to a settled issue, it requested – in the time of questions and answers – the withdrawal of its own bill.
The Table agreed that the parliamentary plenary session should debate this Wednesday as planned the consideration of the bill, a decision in which the PP was left alone and which was supported by Vox and the PSOE, who defended that “the substantive position” should not prevent “the possibility of a debate.”
