Yolanda Díaz announces an agreement with the PSOE to repeal the gag law

The Second Vice President of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, announced this Tuesday an agreement between Sumar and the PSOE to repeal the so-called gag law. Upon her arrival at the Employment and Social Policy Council in Brussels, the Minister of Labour pointed out that this law “is going to be repealed”. “We have just closed it with the Socialist Party,” she said.

The repeal of the gag law is a commitment made by Pedro Sánchez to his investiture partners and, according to Díaz, Sumar also contemplates a reform of the penal code that will affect insults to the crown and other institutions and public freedoms that were conditioned by this norm.

The Prime Minister will announce the measure tomorrow, as part of a broader package that, according to the Vice President, will also include a reform of the law on institutional advertising. “It will prevent those who practice pseudo-journalism and violate ethical codes from being deprived of public funding,” said Díaz, in line with the open door that Sánchez left a few days ago in this regard.

As elDiario.es revealed on Tuesday, Sumar’s objective was for the democratic regeneration plan put forward by Sánchez to go beyond the limitation of institutional advertising. The party has manoeuvred to have the socialists include in that package another series of measures, among which was the repeal of the law on citizen security, known as the gag law.

Specifically, without knowing the specific details of the agreement, Yolanda Díaz’s party demanded the elimination of the sanction for taking pictures of agents of the State Security Forces and Corps and the reform of the Penal Code to protect “freedom of expression” by suppressing crimes against the crown or insults to state institutions that, according to Díaz, would be included in the agreement.

The repeal of the gag law was already included in the coalition agreement signed in 2019 between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos. In it, the parties committed to replacing that rule with another that would guarantee “the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly”, based on “a progressive conception of citizen security”, prioritising “the guarantee of rights and the protection of citizens”.

With the agreement announced on Tuesday, the Government, now with Sumar, will try for the second time to repeal this law, inherited from Mariano Rajoy’s Executive, after the failure in the previous legislature. In 2023, the reform of the law died in Congress after three years of parliamentary processing due to the vote against by ERC and Bildu. The disagreements with these coalition partners had to do with the use of rubber bullets, which was not prohibited, hot returns, fines for disrespect to authority and disobedience.