The Madrid City Council approves the PP motion against the amnesty

It has been a long time coming. The word amnesty was heard for the first time in Cibeles four and a half hours after the ordinary plenary session of the Madrid City Council began, with which the political course in the capital begins, after the elections and after a peaceful summer in the Executive. from Madrid. The Popular Party has presented the same motion to reject the Amnesty Law – a demand raised by the former president Catalan Carles Puigdemont to support a hypothetical investiture of Pedro Sánchez – in all Spanish municipalities, which will presumably go ahead in all those where the PP enjoys an absolute majority, as happened in Madrid this Thursday, or governs in coalition with Vox.

“The city of Madrid has the opportunity to say yes to the Constitution, yes to coexistence, yes to tolerance, yes to equality, yes to freedom, yes to democracy, yes to the rule of law,” the Mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, in a speech that barely lasted three minutes and in which he attacked the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, for “his limitless, excessive and unscrupulous ambition.” Moderate applause from the popular bench. So, he has addressed the opposition leader, Rita Maestre, and the spokesperson for the socialist group, Reyes Maroto. “If in this plenary session I told you that you are stupid beasts in human form, genetically inferior to the Catalans, I would get into a dispute, they are going to agree with those who called it not only to you, but to all of the Spaniards.”

The first reply – which was not such – was given by the Vox spokesperson, Javier Ortega Smith, whose party has presented several amendments to the Popular Party’s proposal, but they have only had an impact on two. First, that all parties represented in Congress avoid any dialogue with parties that promote amnesty. Second: “When in the first point they say we reject any type of amnesty for any Spanish citizen, we add ‘or foreigner’, because it cannot happen that a foreign person in national territory can be favored precisely by that amnesty.” The amendments have been rejected in their entirety.

The fight for the amnesty yes or amnesty no of the Madrid plenary session – staged on the day of respite of Congress after the failed first investiture debate of Alberto Núñez Feijóo – has not lasted more than 15 minutes, although it has slightly raised the tone in one Session, otherwise, decaffeinated and where issues such as dining room scholarships, tree felling for works on line 11, cleaning cantons, nursery schools, environmental initiatives, street safety, bicimad or construction have been mentioned. of protected housing. To the proposal of the Popular Party (29 councilors) against the amnesty, Más Madrid (12 councilors) and PSOE (11) have voted against, while Vox (5) has voted in favor.

“Here Mr. Almeida brings this proposal because his party has told him to do so, with this ridiculous bravado that no councilor was going to be able to hide in this debate. Hide from who? About what? “Yours?” Maestre responded, to slight boos from the popular councilors and energetic applause from Más Madrid. The leader of the opposition has told the mayor that the proposal is a “total anticlimax”: “Your problem, gentlemen of the Popular Party, is that you have had your mouth full of Spain. They have filled their mouths with calling all the rest of us anti-Spanish, and when Spain came out to vote they said no to you and those in front.”

The socialists have presented a counterproposal, so that “the next Government of Spain is urged to continue making dialogue, within the constitutional framework, the tool to improve coexistence between Catalans and between them and the rest of Spain.” The group’s spokesperson, Reyes Maroto, has accused Almeida of creating “a circus” and a “smokescreen” with the motion to reject the amnesty, and of putting the interests of the party before the residents of Madrid. “Whenever citizens put the Popular Party in the opposition, the apocalypse of the breakup of Spain begins, of the threat of equality for the Spanish people, but when the Popular Party needs the nationalists to govern, it does whatever is necessary,” has criticized. On October 5, this same proposal will be voted on in the Madrid Assembly.

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