With only the PP’s signature missing, the pact to renew the judiciary has collapsed. After a telephone conversation this Thursday afternoon between Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez-Feijóo, the negotiations have been “suspended”.
“Feijóo has offered President Sánchez to address together any reform of the Penal Code affecting the crimes of rebellion, sedition, as well as the criminalisation of the calling of an illegal referendum, as President Sánchez himself promised the Spanish people when he ran in the last elections,” the Popular Party said in a statement.
“The talks are suspended until the PSOE decides whether it wants to move forward with a constitutionalist party such as the Popular Party in the institutional sphere or whether it wants to continue hand in hand with parties that seek to weaken the rule of law and break constitutional unity,” the main opposition party has remarked.
For the conservative party, it is an “insurmountable incongruity” that the government wants to both “strengthen” and “unprotect the state”. That is to say, that it is committed on the one hand to the PP to give more independence to the judiciary while, on the other, it gives in to Esquerra to make changes to the crime of sedition.
“Reforming the law to improve judicial independence is not compatible with reforming the law to tell judges that they have to condescend to those who rise up against the unity of Spain”, according to Genoa.
The Popular Party has also revealed that the PSOE’s Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, who is responsible for negotiating with the PSOE, “had told them that it was not in their (the Government’s) plans to undertake this criminal modification”.
Meanwhile, from Ferraz, socialist sources have criticised that “Feijóo demonstrates an absolute lack of political autonomy by not resisting the pressures of the most reactionary right wing which, at all times, has been boycotting this negotiation so that it would not come to fruition”.
The Socialist Party has accused the PP of “breaking off negotiations again. This time with an agreement ready to be signed”. Moreover, they denounce that the “obstructionist” attitude of the PP is “very serious and is damaging the normal functioning of justice”.
