Madrid (EFE) a year of negotiations and 40 meetings to reach an agreement, while already accusing each other of being responsible for that foreseeable failure.
A political fight in which the PSOE has fully entered this Tuesday. On the eve of a new meeting of the reform work, the socialist spokesman in Congress, Patxi López, has not hesitated to accuse the ERC and EH Bildu of electoral calculations for not giving their arm to twist and delaying the progress of the reform.
“We hope that those of us who promised to leave behind the gag law do not now put other interests ahead of these changes that have already been agreed upon and that would not be carried out if they voted against this law,” López said on Tuesday. , before emphasizing that the aspects for which the law that the PP approved alone, renowned as a gag law, are corrected with the nearly 40 agreed transaction amendments and another dozen partial ones.
For this reason, and despite not citing ERC and EH Bildu, his pressure has increased: «If we do not reach an agreement, all these advances will be lost and some, therefore, will be responsible for maintaining the gag law and will not be precisely neither the Socialist Party nor the Government».
The response to these accusations has not been long in coming from EH Bildu, which since the beginning of the negotiations has defended changes in four points that it considers key because they are the most harmful to citizens. It is about riot gear, disrespect for authority, disobedience and resistance and hot returns.
«The Gag Law is named for the most harmful articles (those for which it is most penalized). The PSOE refuses to deactivate them and proposes to maintain a Light Gag Law, breaking its promise, ”the spokesman for the EH Bildu Interior Commission, Jon Iñarritu, responded immediately through his Twitter.
ERC sources consulted are more cautious and have indicated to EFE that they continue to hold meetings from which they will not get up while there are options to improve the law.
Like the PSOE, the PNV, promoter of the reform with a 2017 proposal, has also wanted to issue its ultimatum. His spokesman Aitor Esteban has pointed out that this Wednesday’s presentation is “the hour of truth and retraction.”
Esteban has criticized at a press conference those who do not give in if one hundred percent is not agreed. “Changes never completely satisfy everyone,” he added before pointing out that there are “two intermediate proposals” on two stuck points that could serve to reach an agreement.
Both on Monday electronically and this Tuesday, the six parties in favor of the reform -PSOE, Unidas Podemos, ERC, Junts, PNV and EH Bildu- are speeding up negotiations to reach these agreements and more agreed amendments, including one that affects security controls and another more technical one related to gender distinction.
But, above all, they are making final efforts to try to overcome the presentation and that the reform passes to the next phase, to the Interior Commission.
In short, the unknown is to know if “in extremis” positions on the four cracks of the norm will be approached or if the report of the presentation will finally reach the commission and later a plenary session to execute the promised reform.
For this, it is an essential procedure, according to what parliamentary sources explain to EFE, that the report come out of a presentation with eight of the fifteen signatures distributed weightedly by parliamentary representation.
The block of left-wing parties has the majority for the report to be sent to the commission: PSOE (3 signatures), Unidas Podemos (2); NVP(1); ERC (1), EH Bildu (1) and Grupo Plural (1) which, according to the sources consulted by EFE, would not sign, so the question is whether ERC and Eh Bildu will finally give their approval for the report to come out of presentation.
The same sources recall that normally “out of courtesy” no party opposes its signature in the process of presentation to the report derived from a project of another formation with which you are ideologically in tune.
However, they clarify that, in the event of not having enough signatures, the reform of the gag law would not necessarily fail, since the paper can continue working and give itself more time to reach agreements, although some sources warn that otherwise papers can remain in the air without a solution of continuity.
