A institutional statement of sentence for the expulsion from acampamento of people of gypsy ethnicity in April 2013 in the north of Paris when Manuel Valls He was Minister of the Interior of the French government, has generated controversy this Friday in the plenary session of the Barcelona City Council.
The municipal groups of ERC, BComú, the PSC and JxCat have signed a text that describes what happened then as “worst excluding nationalism”, after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on May 14 that At the time it acted with “violation of the right to respect for private and family life and the home” and also of the “judicial right of effective protection”.
The institutional statement does not mention Valls at any time, but after finishing his reading, the ERC spokesperson in the consistory, Elisenda Alamany, has addressed the now councilor and then Minister of the Interior and said: “Today Barcelona disapproves” .
“An insult to the French Republic”
A few words that have generated unrest in the other groups, including BComú and PSC, among the signatories of the declaration.
Valls has defined the text as “an insult to the French Republic” and has mainly targeted the PSC, which has made it ugly that it has lent itself to this “farce and unworthiness”: “A sign of total lack of leadership, of political quality and elegance ”, he sentenced.
The popular councilor Josep Bou has described the writing as “very regrettable” and Paco Sierra, from Cs, has condemned the “malicious use of the gypsy people” and the “partisan use of the instruments of the consistory”.
A criticism to which Laia Bonet of the PSC has joined, who has accused Alamany of having “loaded the rules of the game” and of having given “a terrible lesson in anti-politics”.
Councilor Marc Serra, of BComú, has also seen “not adequate” that Alamany has used the reading of the institutional statement to later add a reference to Valls that was not in the text.
Approved the declaration, ugly the gesture
The mayor herself, Ada Colau, has ugly the mayor of ERC who has “disrespected the plenary not respecting the rules of the game” and has said that what happened will be discussed at a meeting of spokesmen.
Elsa Artadi, from JxCat, took the opportunity to ask Colau if she would accept being mayor again “thanks to Mr. Valls”.
Alamany has finally withdrawn his allusion in the framework of the reading of the institutional declaration, although he has maintained what was said during the intervention that has established the position of ERC.
In it, he maintained that “today’s racism wears a tie and speaks exquisitely” and encouraged Valls to “ask for forgiveness” for his performance as French Minister of the Interior in that episode.
The scuffle ended with Valls, visibly upset, trying to speak without taking the floor, something that Colau has repeated several times until the former French prime minister has given up on his attempt.
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