Esquerra Republicana has advanced this Wednesday that it wants to register a proposal to try to reactivate the reform of the gag law after the failure on Tuesday of the negotiations on the PNV proposal that had been in parliament for three years and that did have the consensus of the two government parties. Sources from the Republican group explain that they are going to speak with their partners to present a new proposal with all the agreed points of the previous one and resume negotiations on the issues that have prevented the agreement so far, such as the ban on rubber balls or the hot returns.
The gag law, rubber balls and the contradictions of the left
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The idea that the parliamentary group manages and that it has transferred to the rest of the groups, according to the sources consulted, is a text agreed with the Basque independentistas and the confederal space based on the agreements that were reached during the processing of the text that its formation and EH Bildu fell next to the right on Tuesday in commission after failing to reach a consensus to ban rubber balls, hot returns and reduce fines for disrespect and disobedience to security force agents. EH Bildu sources report that at the moment it is a proposal from Esquerra Republicana and that they will study it if they finally decide to promote it as they do with all the others.
ERC does not renounce these points in any case, but believes that the Government precipitated the negotiation of the reform by calling the Interior Commission when there was still no agreement with them for the entire text. This movement would serve to give negotiations a new opportunity, although parliamentary times, with two electoral processes in one year, make it difficult for a negotiation of this type to conclude before the end of the legislature.
The text that reached the Commission this Tuesday was agreed by more than 98%, according to the government parties, in the absence of these three or four more controversial points: article 23.4 to prohibit the use of rubber balls; 36.6 on sanctions for disobedience to agents; 37.4 that seeks to eliminate or at least objectify sanctions for disrespect for authority and an additional provision to put an end to hot returns. Both the PSOE and the negotiating party of Unidas Podemos, represented by Enrique Santiago, regretted that for these issues the parliamentary partners dropped a text that according to them already dismantled the gag law approved by the Government of Mariano Rajoy.
The proposal that the groups debated yesterday had the agreement of the two government parties and the Basque Nationalist Party, but it needed to get ahead the numbers of ERC and EH Bildu, who had already warned that without those four points, which they considered the most “harmful” of the reform, they would not support giving an opinion on the report and that it could be voted on in plenary in the coming weeks. The failure of that reform, after three years of parliamentary processing, yesterday unleashed a crossover of accusations between the PSOE, the coalition and the parliamentary partners, with divisions also within the space of United We Can.
The president of that parliamentary group, Jaume Asens, went so far as to accuse Esquerra and EH Bildu of electoralism for refusing to support a reform that already met a broad consensus and for having “turned their backs” on those who have fought for years to repeal the law . The Socialist Party itself also accused the partners of looking for “excuses” to oppose the text that came to the Commission yesterday and which, according to what they repeated, was “98% agreed”. “There is no law in Catalonia that prohibits rubber balls. They said they were going to make a law and they didn’t. Hot returns are a matter of the Immigration Law ”, summarized the socialist spokesman, Patxi López, at a press conference on Tuesday.
