If a viable resolution happens this Tuesday in the Senate, it is possible to legalize the crimes of sedition and embezzlement. In order for the reform to become legal, PSOE and ERC agreed to add the reduction of penalties for embezzlement and differentiate between cases where there is personal gain. This decision needs to be compared with an exit ramp vote on Thursday.
Despite some discomfort, PSOE and Unidas Podemos agree with ERC to remove the court-ordered flexible budgets for the express processing of crimes. The purples, too, approve of the text. In recent days, several leaders from United We Can have expressed support for the initiative.
After Monday, the debate in Congress turned to this week’s session. In fact, many of the groups that supported the opinion on the sedition reform focused their interventions on this crime and ignored that it also included a reduction in sentences in certain cases of the crime of embezzlement. ERC, on the contrary, openly defended the agreement reached, assuring that “it means limiting the crime of embezzlement without decriminalizing it” and criticizing the “demagogy” that, in his opinion, is being done on this matter.
“What we do is democratize and adapt to European standards a Penal Code that is one of the most punitive in Europe,” defended ERC deputy Carolina Telechea. For its part, the PSOE assured that “compared to those who think that life was better earlier, we believe that in 2022 we will have a stronger society”, and affirmed that with its amendments “no form of embezzlement is decriminalized, but stricter persecution is put in place” while it also did not refer to further reductions of sentences.
The center-right bloc got huge support in the last election after taking a strong stance against corruption and infringing on democratic rights. Now that they’ve been rejected, PP, Vox, and Ciudadanos (C’s) have continued to defend the same attitude that they are promoting: criticizing what they consider an “ignoble reform” – according to Ciudadanos- which represents a “step back from democracy”- according to PP- and “a clear institutional coup d’état”. C issued a statement arguing that “if necessary, the rule of law can be imposed unilaterally.”
The analysis by Luis Santamaría has predicted that, with the elimination of crimes and new wording of embezzlement “at the dictation of independence and the bankruptcy of the separation of powers”, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, “will go down in history for deconstructing Spain, for leaving 1-O contested, for having built a silver bridge for Junqueras to be an ERC candidate for the Generalitat, and for building Spain closer than ever to an unnatural referendum.” In addition, he has stressed that embezzlement takes “an incomprehensible step back in fighting against corruption by returning to the previous type of 2015”.
In a recent interview with EL PAÍS, Ciudadanos President Albert Rivera condemned the “clear authoritarian tone” that appears to underlie the current progressive societies in Spain and the “authoritarianism of Pedro Sánchez” which makes for millions of Spaniards standing witness to “the constitutional bankruptcy Spain is experiencing”, as Rivera calls it. Thus, the PP asserts itself to be one who fights on behalf of “the Spanish people every day.”
The PP has wanted to distance itself from the “hasty and hasty way of legislating”, which means legislating without reflection. Vox has also denounced the “obvious procedural and regulatory fraud, processed in haste” in which “there is no calm time for debate.”
Deputy Ortega Smith is appalled by the government’s reforms to the “peaceful” process of sedition, arguing that they only serve to benefit those who have spent decades trying to divide and conquer our society with violence and coercion. Ortega Smith supports a democratic solution that would overthrow the government and replace it with one that will respect international law, as well as repeal this legislative nonsense.
Deputy Edmundo Bal is appealing to the Socialists. He warns them that socialists will vote not to punish those who riotously rise up in public to prevent, by force or outside of legal channels, the application of the laws.
Sedition, initially as a crime, entailed absolute disqualification. “That is so serious that those who commit this crime cannot be allowed to participate in the system.” In fact, the Supreme Court’s sentence condemning the process made it clear that sedition was not the same as disorder and I classify it as people who have carried out a concerted attack on the constitutional bases of the system.
Bucking precedent, he again calls on the socialists to reconsider what they’re doing. “You are supporting the anti-system; you are trying to hide it in a crime of aggravated public disorder in which it is said that it is about those who disturb public peace by carrying out acts of violence. But if ERC or Junst affirm that there were no acts of violence… on 1-O there will not even be public disorders!” Bal ironically.
