Feijóo urges Sánchez to “decide” if he wants to advance with his party or continue hand in hand with independence with measures such as lowering the crime of sedition
The negotiations between the Government and the PP to renew the General Council of the Judiciary after almost four years with the expired mandate entered the dry dock this Thursday. Just when both parties encouraged the idea that the pact was imminent. The cause of the discord: the intention of Pedro Sánchez to undertake a reform of the Penal Code to reduce the penalties attributable to the crime of sedition for which the leaders of the ‘procés’ were convicted, as Esquerra has been claiming for months. The popular maintain that from the Executive they had been assured that it would not be processed, but the fact that the president himself reaffirmed from South Africa his intention to carry it forward, led them to suspend all conversation.
In a statement sent to the media late in the afternoon, the main opposition party explains that, after hearing the Chief Executive, Alberto Núñez Feijóo contacted him to express his “strangeness” and that he confirmed what raised at a press conference during his African tour. “Our vocation for agreement is as firm as our conviction that we cannot continue to advance while President Sánchez does not provide sufficient guarantees that he will not continue to use all the powers of the State to facilitate the path for all those who want to fight him,” they argue to justify the rupture.
The outcome could be seen coming as early as noon given the immediate reaction of the PP to Sánchez’s statement that the pact for the renewal of the CGPJ was “ready and prepared”, just waiting for the popular to ratify their political will to initial it. In that same appearance, the head of the Executive had dropped that his road map for Catalonia was to recover the aforementioned reform of the Penal Code – an offer that he put on the table twenty days after his investiture, but that until now had been rejected by the Republicans – and had warned Feijóo that he would not give her up to preserve the agreement. “One thing is the legislative agenda, against which one can vote as many times as one wishes, and another is strict compliance with our constitutional obligations.”
Just a few minutes later, the main opposition party already issued the first statement of the day, a clue as to what could come next. With a ‘NO’ in capital letters, he denied the imminence of the pact in judicial matters. “It is not true that the solution is closed neither in the scope of the General Council of the Judiciary nor in the Constitutional Court,” he warned.
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