The mobilization called by the PP for Sunday, September 24 in Madrid against amnesty to those involved in the ‘procés’ that Pedro Sánchez is apparently going to grant them is surprising for various reasons. The first, without a doubt, is the senselessness of exercising opposition in the streets to a future Sánchez Government just two days before the start of the investiture session in which Alberto Núñez Feijóo will ask for the support of the Congress of Deputies precisely to evict the leader of the PSOE and be the next tenant of the Moncloa. Nobody trusts that this investiture attempt will succeed, but that the interested party himself will join the a mobilization that implicitly considers him a loser in advance It is still significant and raises the question of why it is presented (or with what interests it is convened). As striking as even anticipating a hypothetical investiture of his rival assuming that he will achieve it with concessions that he considers inadmissible –many do it, not only in the PP–. Beyond the fact that Sánchez is attributed, perhaps sometimes deservedly, with unlimited ambition and at any price, it is risky to project oneself in that way into the future, no matter how immediate it may seem.
It is not the first time that this type of preventive mobilizations have occurred, taking for granted transfers that later did not occur, to exercise opposition to a socialist Government. It happened in February 2019, with the demonstration of the famous photo of Columbus, with the leaders of the PP (Pablo Casado), Cs (Albert Rivera) and Vox (Santiago Abascal), when Sánchez was attributed with having given in to the 21 requests of the then president Quim Torra: self-determination for Catalonia or the international rapporteur, among them . had occurred Before, in 2006, in the campaign organized by the PP against the reform of the Statute, which was accompanied by a collection of signatures that only contributed to polarizing and generating animosity against Catalonia and the Catalans in broad layers of the Spanish population. The independence movement also has precedents for the cost of having excited the streets when the time comes to engage in politics instead of agitation.
An initiative like the one on September 24 is more typical of the PP sector that more radically defends the idea of a uniform Spain and who is least willing to open a debate about, for example, the lace of Catalonia that Feijóo does mention. If this position is imposed, the necessary and difficult consensus on the Spanish territorial question will be blocked.
There are divergent positions on the convenience of an amnesty and whether this can be justified in exchange for an investiture and without compensation from the beneficiaries, such as the renunciation of unilaterality. But There is little doubt about the need to continue advancing in anti-inflammation and normalization of the situation in Catalonia and for that, in addition to the decisions that the Government has been adopting in the last legislature, it would be advisable to have the contributions of the PP. At least, with their constructive participation in the search for solutions and in the way they are applied. Otherwise, in the absence of a broad consensus, the measures will always be one-sided, with the risk of being reversed if the Government changes and, therefore, unstable. It does not seem, unfortunately, that former President Aznar’s harangue and the subsequent mobilization on the 24th go in that direction.