Las Palmas De Gran Canaria (EFE).- The former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the PP José Manuel García Margallo has presented this Monday in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria his book “Spain in its labyrinth”, in a forum where he has equated the Spain of today with the failure “due to sectarianism” of the Second Republic.
Before speaking at this event, organized by the newspapers La Provincia and El Día, the popular MEP explained to the journalists that he began this book when he was a student at the University of Deusto and it was already evident that a political change was going to take place in Spain, whose objective was to “dilute a dictatorship in democratic institutions without violence” at a time when the terrorist group ETA had already appeared.
“To the tensions typical of a normal political transition were added the difficulties of a political transition with a separatism that had taken on violent overtones and, therefore, threatened to distort the peace,” he said.
In García Margallo’s opinion, history has shown that the crises of the 19th century were solved when they entrusted themselves to “two moderate, tolerant parties, located in the political center and that coincided in what Benito Pérez Galdós himself called ‘the mother truths’. ‘; that is to say, the unity of Spain, freedoms, the Rule of Law, the market economy and the insertion of Spain in the world”.
And, he has abounded, these crises “were not resolved well when the Spanish had chosen to give their trust to extreme parties that were increasingly moving away from each other and were incapable of dialogue with each other”, a situation that he has compared with the one that , in his opinion, is taking place today in Spain, a country in which there is no dialogue between the two large political blocs.
In his book, the former minister reviews the role that political polarization had in different historical milestones, such as the Civil War, the First Republic, the Restoration, the fall of Alfonso XIII, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship or the Second Republic, which, according to He has said, “it was a lost opportunity” due to the “sectarianism of President Azaña, who said that he was either from the left, or he would not be.”
A situation that he has compared with that of the Transition, where, he has stressed, “the opposite occurred because there were two focused parties: the Union of the Democratic Center and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, which chose the German and Swedish social democratic path, unlike the French, Italian and Greek.
“I am telling this because we are now in a very similar moment. They agree on the basic principles of the system and apply three recipes that are exactly what we are not applying now: legality – what happened in Catalonia is trying to gain independence through a procedure outside the Constitution, through a coup d’état – ; the method, which is consensus and prudence, not putting things on the table that the other party cannot accept; and then a style in which there is no insult, injury, violence, but rather a faculty of understanding. And all that goes well, ”he asserted.
The ex-minister has explained that his work begins with an adaptation of the question “when did Peru get screwed”, by Vargas Llosa, to which he answers that “Spain gets screwed in 2003, when Rodríguez Zapatero is elected general secretary of the PSOE and elects the radical way”, through which the PSOE has said, “ceases to be a social democrat to be a franchise of identity groups”.
By virtue of this, García Margallo has continued, Rodríguez Zapatero “closes a pact with the nationalist parties, which is the Tinell Pact” for which he promised them “support so that they govern in the historical nations” in exchange for them “giving him They will support him to govern” the country, a formula that, in his opinion, is now also applied by Pedro Sánchez.
Accept “any statute that comes from the Parliament of Catalonia, renouncing that the Government of Spain verifies whether or not it is constitutional, and sign that the PP will not be discussed, neither inside nor outside Catalonia, about any other issue”, they are, in the opinion of García Margallo, the “failures” in which Rodríguez Zapatero incurred and which Sánchez has later replicated.
And this favors, in his opinion, “a confrontation between two blocks with very little capacity to understand and solve the problems that Spain has”, as a model that promotes a more productive economy, regional financing or pensions, issues that require of “a great national agreement”.
For the former minister, the Government headed by Pedro Sánchez promotes “a flagrant occupation of the institutions”, which, as he has stressed, means “liberal democracy is at stake” because “we have lost legislative quality, as stated by the European Commission report on the National Reform Plan”.
“We have not evaluated public policies and Spanish democracy has deteriorated,” said that report, as assured by García Margallo, who advocates changing the course of the Spanish economy, estimating that “it continues to be analog in a digital world.”
“The per capita income of Spain is today the same as that of 2006, so we have lost 16 years, and the index of social unrest, which adds unemployment and inflation, is the highest in the European Union and over time that Pedro Sánchez has been in Moncloa has deteriorated by 44% ”, he added. EFE