The PP has been repeating for months that Spain, especially the Canary Islands, is suffering from the “worst migration crisis in recent decades.” A situation that, according to the first opposition party, causes a humanitarian crisis due to the overcrowding of thousands of people, many of them minors. This Wednesday, the parties involved met again, including the institutional representatives of Ceuta, to seek a comprehensive solution. But the rigidity of the PP, through its negotiator Miguel Tellado, has blocked any agreement option. And perhaps almost definitively, which leads the Executive to seek emergency solutions with the autonomous communities.
Expectations for this Wednesday’s meeting were zero beforehand. The PP had made it clear that it will only agree to reform the law to systematize interterritorial solidarity in the shelter of minors if the Government renounces its immigration policy and assumes Feijóo’s. An approach that the Executive rejects outright. “We didn’t know that we had to embrace their politics to be able to govern,” says one of the people present at the event.
The meeting took place at the Canary Islands Government delegation in Madrid, in a stately building attached to the Congress. The Canary Islands president, Fernando Clavijo, served as host. Also present were the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, the Minister of Childhood, Sira Rego, the President of Ceuta, Juan José Vivas (PP), as well as Tellado himself and the Deputy Secretary of Social Policy of the PP, Ana Alós.
The meeting lasted about two hours, but the result was unsuccessful. At the exit, and before traveling to Valencia to support Carlos Mazón in his first appearance before the leadership of the autonomous PP after DANA, Tellado made clear the position of the leadership chaired by Feijóo: he requested a “change in immigration policy” and He called the Government’s “effort” to modify article 35 of the Immigration Law to “impose a distribution” as an “error.”
This legal reform is the crux of the issue because, today, there is no way to force the autonomous communities to welcome minors who commit themselves. In fact, the communities governed by the PP have not yet assumed the care of the 400 minors despite having agreed to do so last July in a negotiation that already went back further. Meanwhile, the Government distributes the money committed to the regions to cover expenses derived from this care.
Clavijo’s new proposal
Tellado boasted before the meeting that he was attending the meeting as a representative of 12 autonomous governments plus the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. But given the blockade, the Government and the Canary Islands raised the need to address an emergency distribution that, like the one last July, helps reduce healthcare pressure both on the islands and in the autonomous cities of North Africa.
Sources present at the meeting assure elDiario.es that Tellado said he could not undertake this negotiation and referred to a future sectoral conference between the Government and the autonomous communities. The Executive assures that this meeting will be called soon, although not before the end of the year.
The parties left the meeting with visible signs of anger. The Canary Islands president, Fernando Clavijo, who governs with the support of the PP, did not even want to attend to the journalists who were waiting in front of the Madrid delegation of his Government. The vice president of the Canary Islands, Manuel Domínguez, of the PP, remains on the sidelines of conversations that are directly supervised by the national leadership.
Clavijo has tried in the last year to find an intermediate position that could convince everyone. First, he pressured the PP to accept a reform of article 35, which Feijóo’s party overthrew along with Junts. Afterwards, he signed a document with Feijóo himself that included a series of requests that have largely already been fulfilled by the central government.
This Wednesday, Clavijo attended the meeting with a new technical proposal that allows establishing the parameters of when the receiving region should take care of the minors, from what pressure the distribution mechanism can be activated to other communities and what part should be financed. the central government.
But Feijóo’s party has preferred to block the negotiations. In fact, one of the people present at the meeting on behalf of the PP said when leaving that this Wednesday would be the last meeting of these characteristics: “There are no more meetings.”
The one who did speak was the president of Ceuta, the popular Juan José Vivas, although at first he wanted to avoid the press. “The Government of the Autonomous City leaves the meeting frustrated, but with the same position it had when it entered,” he said before leaving, and settled: “We believe that the modification of article 35 of the law is necessary. We believe that it is necessary to assume that the phenomenon of migration affects minors. It is an issue that concerns, more than concerns, all of Spain, not just the Canary Islands or Ceuta. We believe that it has to be approached from the point of view of solidarity, co-responsibility and the spirit of the Constitution, now that we are going to celebrate it soon.”
Vivas said he did not want to point out anyone to blame for the fiasco of the appointment.
Meanwhile, the Government received a visit from the President of Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, a country to which Pedro Sánchez already traveled last summer in the midst of the escalation of the departure of migrants to Spain and with whom different cooperation agreements have been signed.
The Mauritanian president not only met with the President of the Government. Also with King Felipe VI at the Zarzuela Palace. A reception on which the King’s House did not wish to comment and which was attended by the Spanish Secretary of State for the EU, Fernando Sampedro.
The government opens the door to reform by decree
After a year of fruitless negotiations with the PP, the Government admits that they have stopped having expectations about the real will of Feijóo’s people to reach an agreement to which Pedro Sánchez gave top priority after his inauguration. The president personally commissioned Minister Ángel Víctor Torres to reach an understanding with the opposition on the reception mechanisms for migrant minors, an issue that the head of Territorial Policy knows first-hand as a former Canarian president.
The Executive assures that they approached these conversations with moderate optimism. Because the popular ones are part of the Canarian government and because the path of understanding with President Clavijo had proven fruitful in the investiture. But nothing could be further from the truth. Government sources familiar with the negotiations assure that during the last year up to dozens of demands that the PP has put on the table in different phases of the negotiation have been accepted. The last one, to demand that the president of the European Commission be more involved in the care of migrant minors.
But the result has always been the same. Every popular demand fulfilled by the Government has been followed by a new demand. This Thursday, Sánchez endorses the opposition’s global immigration policy in matters such as extraditions, border control or asylum policy, a debate that far transcends the reason for the negotiation, focused on the management of migrant minors.
Pedro Sánchez’s team maintains that the attitude of the PP throughout the negotiation is mainly due to two reasons. The first, its dependence on Vox to carry out the budgets of the Communities and City Councils in which the extreme right is indispensable from a mathematical point of view. Those from Santiago Abascal had “suspended” the negotiations before this Wednesday’s meeting. In summer, Vox already broke the autonomous governments that it shared with the PP.
And the second, the influence of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. According to the Government sources consulted, the Madrid executive is always the first to distance itself in sectoral conferences from the interterritorial solidarity mechanisms that are proposed. And after that unmarking, Génova Street always follows behind.
For this reason, and because the situation in the Canary Islands and the arriving migrant minors is worsening by the day (today there are 6,000, according to the sources consulted), the Executive is now opening the door to materializing the reform of article 35 of the immigration law by decree. This decree then requires the support of the majority of the Congress of Deputies, who already rejected taking the reform into consideration before the summer with votes against the PP itself but also Junts.
With Puigdemont, the Government is finalizing an agreement prior to the General State Budgets for the delegation of powers to Catalonia in immigration matters, one of the commitments acquired with the independentists in exchange for their parliamentary support. And precisely in this context there are those who assure in the central Executive that there would be room to find in Junts support for the reform of the immigration law that they consider a priority to respond to the crisis faced by territories such as Ceuta or the Canary Islands and that remains in a legal limbo and the most absolute defenselessness of almost 6,000 migrant kids.
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