Tens of thousands of people have gathered across Spain to protest against the acting government’s plans to secure another term in office by offering an amnesty to those who took part in the illegal and failed push for Catalan independence six years ago.
The proposed amnesty law, which would apply to hundreds of people who participated in the unilateral effort to secede from Spain, has already led to a series of violent protests outside the Madrid headquarters of the governing Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE).
While the PSOE’s leader and caretaker prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, argues that the act of clemency would help promote coexistence after the tumultuous political and territorial crisis of 2017, his opponents have decried the move as a cynical and self-serving means of remaining in power.
The issue of an amnesty arose after July’s inconclusive general election. Although the conservative People’s party (PP) finished first, it has proved unable to form a government, even with the support of the far-right Vox party and other, smaller groupings.
However, the PSOE and its partners in the leftwing Sumar alliance have been able to muster the necessary backing by promising the amnesty to the two main Catalan pro-independence parties in return for their support. Sánchez is now expected to win congress’s approval to be reappointed prime minister in a debate and vote towards the end of this week.
Protests were held on Sunday in towns and cities across the country, including Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Valencia.
People congregating in the capital’s Puerta del Sol square carried effigies of Sánchez as Pinocchio, chanted, “Prison for Pedro Sánchez” and carried banners with messages includin: “Democracy in Spain is at risk”, “Sánchez traitor” and “No amnesty for terrorism – Europe, save us”.
The PP said 500,000 people had taken part in the Madrid rally, while the central government’s delegate to the region put attendance at 80,000.
Speaking in Puerta del Sol, the PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijoo, once again accused Sánchez of “buying his investiture in return for giving his partners judicial impunity” and said Spaniards would not remain silent over the amnesty.
“The office of prime minister of Spain can’t be an object to be bought and sold,” said Feijóo. “Spaniards want democracy, equality, justice and dignity. Spain has never sold itself, and they [the PSOE] have tried to cover up the fact that they lost. The prime minister of Spain will always be the person that’s won the elections.”
His colleague Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the populist PP president of the Madrid region, went further, telling the crowd that Sánchez had finally revealed his “totalitarian” project.
“He’s decided that he will not lose power, whatever the cost for Spain; that nothing and no one will take it from him,” she said. “He’s decided to dynamite the rules of the game and to suppress institutions and state powers.”
Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, described Sánchez’s deal with the Catalan parties as “a coup d’état in capital letters” and said it was the “most delicate moment in Spanish politics in the past 40 years”. He also called for a “permanent and peaceful mobilisation” that went far beyond Sunday’s one-off demonstrations.
Sánchez himself has urged the PP to show “good sense” and to cease trying to stir things up.
“I ask them to respect the result at the ballot box and the legitimacy of the government we will soon form,” he said on Saturday. “I ask them to be brave and to say no to the bear-hug of the far right, and to abandon the reactionary path that they’re currently following towards the abyss. We will govern for all Spaniards – for four more years of social progress and coexistence.”
