In the tense political conversation, words are heard whose echo crosses the walls of the hemicycle of the Congress of Deputies. For its forcefulness, for its meaning, for its grandiloquence and because, of so many times repeated, one ends up not distinguishing between what is a democracy, a dictatorship or an autocracy. Surely it is not the case of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who this week endorsed the favorite formula of Vox’s ultra -right, but also of his colleague Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to refer to the form of government of Pedro Sánchez as an autocracy.
The PP leader left the Moncloa after interviewing the president of the Government and appeared in the Parliament to alert Spain of Sánchez’s “autocrat” drift for wanting to make fun of the Cortes to approve the increase in the expenditure in defense required by the EU after knowing Trump’s intention to withdraw the military shield that has protected Europe since World War II.
Feijóo demanded that any rise be subjected to debate and vote in the lower house, something that in democracy is not only legitimate but highly recommended if what is about to value deliberation and the parliamentary system. However, adding that “the basic precept of any democracy is that all decisions and commitments are endorsed by the representatives of national sovereignty because the opposite leads to something very dangerous, to the autocracy” is Mendaz. It is not knowing what the Constitution says regarding foreign and defense policy. And it is amending what was done before the governments of Aznar and Felipe González
The Feijóo doctrine about autocracy reaches two of the former presidents most invoked by the PP leader when he speaks of state men. And not because they will not lead to the parliament successive increases in defense spending, but because they did not even undergo the sending of Spanish troops to foreign missions, a screen before which at the present time it has not been reached and before which, in any case, Sanchez would be obliged to request the endorsement of Congress. This was established by a reform of the National Defense Law approved by the Zapatero government, not by José María Aznar, or by Felipe González.
The autocracy, according to the SAR, is the form of government in which the will of a single person is the supreme law. And, according to Feijóo, it is where Sánchez travels, although in article 97 of the Constitution it establishes that “the Government directs internal and foreign policy, civil and military administration and the defense of the State. Exercises the executive function and the regulatory power in accordance with the Constitution and the laws ”.
The Organic Law of National Defense also states that it corresponds to the Government “to determine the defense policy and ensure its execution, as well as direct the military administration and agree on the participation of the Armed Forces in missions outside the national territory.” And specifically attributes to the President “the Directorate of Defense Policy and the determination of its objectives, the management of crisis situations that affect the defense and strategic direction of military operations in case of force use.” And although the same rule establishes that it is up to the General Courts to “approve the laws related to the defense and the corresponding budgetary credits”, Sanchez has not determined, because it has not yet done so, how it will be faced with the increase in military spending proposed by Europe.
Three warships in 1990 without guarantee of Congress
In any case, Felipe González, after Kuwait’s invasion in 1990, ordered the shipment to the Gulf of three Spanish warships without previously consulting Parliament, although it had the umbrella of a practically unanimous resolution of the United Nations Security Council, which authorized the use of all necessary means to expel Iraqi troops.
And it would not be until 1995 when Congress unanimously approved a resolution on the UN reform that said: “Spanish participation in peace operations will always be done under the authority of the United Nations and by mandate of its Security Council.” Three years after reaching the government and to overcome that parliamentary resolution, Aznar promised to regulate “the specific mechanisms for consulting Parliament in cases of participation or collaboration of Spain in military operations, especially those that entail the use of force.”
He never did it, although he said he was willing, as stated in the Congress session, “to present a report to the parliamentary groups in which he can establish the general guidelines or the code of action by virtue of which the Government, in its relationship with the Parliament, establishes the convenient mechanisms for any circumstance that may occur in operations that the Atlantic Alliance can carry out.”
900 military to Iraq in 2003
In March 2003, his government would order, with a humanitarian character, the sending of 900 military to Iraq, among marine infants, land units specialized in nuclear, bacteriological and chemical defense and a army frigate for escort, safety and support tasks. “We are on the right place with the right company,” said Aznar without any authorization from Congress. It was then Zapatero who from the opposition accused him of subverting foreign policy, violating legality and predicted what would later happen, that would go down in history as “a president who turned his absolute majority into a deranged exercise of absolutism and divorced from the majority of the population.”
Does that decision make Aznar a autocrat? Is it or is on its way to being Spain with Pedro Sánchez? In its latest study on democracy in the world, the V-DeM Institute (varieties of democracy) of the University of Gothenburg reveals that the world was divided almost to equal parts between 91 democracies and 88 autocracies and that 71% of the world’s population-5,700 million people-lives in self-critics, which represents an increase with respect to 48% of ten years ago.
About the exegetes of state policies
Self -ocratization is ongoing, according to the same study, in 42 countries, and one in which the trend is more pronounced is Hungary. Spain does not appear anywhere, and yes Israel, the referent of the Spanish right in the Middle East, which has come out for the first time in 50 years of the category of liberal democracy.
Different issue from the debate about whether Sánchez leads to Spain or not to an autocracy is whether the government should, because it is a matter of state, to seek the widest consensus for the increase in military spending required by the rearma of Europe. The president does not seem arranged because he knows the fragility of the most parliamentary, because he knows the unpopularity of a measure as he is in a deeply pacifist society and because he is not willing to ask the PP to his votes. The PP also does not have too many enthusiasts among its ranks and neither among its media referents to go to the help of Sánchez. In fact, among the exegetes of state policies, there are those who encouraged him to join the methods of ayuso and hold the president when he summoned him in Moncloa.
They are the same that fill the mouths of Spain, constitution and homeland, but they falter in a matter of memory because when they call the agreement between PP and PSOE and urged to take out the partisan debate subjects that must remain unchanged outside the margin of the government’s orientation change never remember that most of the state agreements reached in democracy closed with the right in the Moncloa and the left in the opposition. There were seven and only two were signed when the PSOE was in the government: the reissue of the regional pact in 1992, with Felipe González in the presidency, and the Toledo Pact, signed in 1995 also with González in La Moncloa. The rest, the 1981 regional development, the 2000 anti -terrorist – amplined in 2016 to include the jihadist phenomenon – and the one signed against gender violence of 2016 and its successive renovations.
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