Sánchez announces a reform in the organic regulations of the intelligence services, which requires an absolute majority that is not guaranteed. The president stresses that he was not aware of the CNI’s operational decisions and launches a harsh attack against the PP for its corruption
The ‘Pegasus case’ will not pass in vain. The Government takes advantage of this chapter to promote two key measures that will help calm the crisis with the Generalitat and specifically with its ERC partner: it will reform the organic law regulating the National Intelligence Center (CNI) to strengthen “control guarantees” and ensure “maximum respect for individual and political rights,” and at the same time it will also approve a new classified information lawwhich will replace the current official secrets law of 1968, a step that “cannot be postponed”.
The president, Pedro Sánchez, solemnized these two announcements this Thursday in the plenary session of Congress, in an extraordinary appearance requested by opposition groups on espionage on independence leaders and activists. Especially relevant was the first, which had already been prepared in recent days, especially after the recommendations of the Ombudsman’s report became known. And it is still a risky operation, since changing the organic regulation of the CNI requires absolute majority and, as members of the Executive observed yesterday, Wednesday, the bipartisan would not have a guaranteed majority for now to carry out the initiative, due to the presumed rejection of the PP and the usual partners. Not from the PNV, which has indeed pushed for and proposed changes in the regulations of the intelligence services.
Sánchez arrived at these two announcements after recalling that next week will be four years since his arrival at Moncloa through a motion of censure against the PP and in which he already promised that he would head a “Government incompatible with corruption and committed to democratic regeneration. Since 2018, he said, he has tried to fulfill that mandate and there is no longer a “bull to appropriate public money”neither “parallel cops“Today, he presumed, “the Constitution is defended” with the methods provided by the Magna Carta itself and “without skipping the Constitution.” Thus, he expressed just the opposite of what was happening with the popular in power, against whom he launched a very strong barrage: “The Spanish public opinion attended between astonished and indignant at an endless cascade of corruption scandals of its rulers, who with one hand cut back and with the other they collected salaries in b”.
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To the “financial corruption represented by the ‘Gürtel case’ and the “instrumentalization” of the State Security Forces and Bodies that ‘Operation Kitchen’ entails, would be added, in the president’s opinion, the “democratic corruption” of the PP, the “not assuming the democratic results” of the elections and thinking that “the power is only theirs”. But those attacks on the conservatives were nothing more than the prelude to the mollar part of his speech, the one related to the operation of national security and the espionage of the independence movement and the one that he himself suffered with the Israeli malware Pegasus.
Sánchez insisted, as his government had already done, that the Executive does set the “priorities” in terms of risks to national security, but “does not know or decide on the operational decisions of the intelligence services.” That is to say, he did not know if in 2019, with him already in Moncloa, the CNI was spying on the then vice president of the Generalitat and who today presides over the Government, Pere Aragonès. The thesis, then, is the one that Moncloa has been holding all this time: that the CNI decided and requested the corresponding judicial authorization from the Supreme Court magistrate. The president did recognize that the context of that moment explains the wiretapping: it is “evident” that from 2015 to 2020, with the self-determination referendum, the unilateral declaration of independence, the “sabotage” in many parts of Catalonia or the “fires” in the streets that followed the sentence of the ‘procés’, the crisis was “a source of enormous concern for national security”.