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Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in Spain against the investiture pact that will allow the first re-election as president of the government of the socialist Pedro Sánchez. The right-wing Popular Party (PP) called 52 rallies in each of the country’s provincial capitals, in which the degree of indignation caused in conservative voters by the agreement signed by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) with the Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalist formations.
Official estimates from government delegations throughout the country, which depend on the socialist Executive, put the popular mobilization at more than 600 thousand people. Although, the PP, which was the organizing organization, raised it to two million protesters throughout the country. For example in Madrid, where the largest protest was recorded, while the PP estimated it at 500 thousand people, the central government lowered it to 80 thousand.
In any case, this Sunday there was one of the most massive popular mobilizations in recent years. In Madrid, all the streets of the center and the Puerta del Sol were flooded with citizens carrying their Spanish flags and their banners with slogans against Pedro Sánchez, the recipient of most of the slogans that were chanted throughout the demonstration, the mostly insults: “Pedro Sánchez, son of a bitch”; “Not in our name”; “It is not a headquarters, it is a brothel” (in reference to the central office in the capital of the PSOE); “Marlaska faggot” (in direct reference to the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who has made a flag of his homosexuality); “Spain has woken up”; and “Christian, non-Muslim Spain”, among others.
The rallies called by the PP were held in the 52 provincial capitals throughout the country, with special success in Madrid and the main cities of Andalusia, Valencia, Castilla y León, Murcia, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, Galicia and Extremadura. In Catalonia, a mass gathering was also recorded, but only in Barcelona, while in the rest of the cities, such as Girona, Tarragona and Lleida, the influx was marginal.
In any case, the PP managed to take to the streets hundreds of thousands of people who, peacefully, expressed their rejection of the agreements that will allow Sánchez’s investiture next week, especially the one signed with Junts per Catalunya (JxCat ) and its leader, the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, which guarantees a general amnesty law for separatist citizens accused of causes linked to the unilateral independence process of October 2017, in addition to opening the door to bilateral negotiations with the State Spanish to hold an independence referendum in the next four years and to transfer powers in fiscal matters to the region, with which Catalonia would collect everything it receives and the policy of redistribution of wealth with the rest of the more autonomous regions would not be applied. poor that existed until now.
At the Madrid demonstration, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, was the main speaker in a speech in which he advanced his public response from the streets and the institutions in which you govern: “We will not remain silent until we speak in an election, because what is being done is the opposite of what we have voted for. Why are they afraid of the polls? We must build a great process of understanding, as in the Transition, and not fall into the provocations of the left, which tries to demonize the protests. Let them know that they are not going to intimidate us,” he said.
Furthermore, the leader of the right affirmed that “it is not the polls, it is the greed of a person that has brought us here. He has overstated the electoral value of the independence movement. With 6 percent they cannot decide for 100 percent of Spaniards. They have less support than ever but they have found a shortcut. I have always fought the independence movement, but at least they are going ahead. Sanchez no. And also thousands of socialists do not agree with their general secretary.”
At the end of the PP rallies, thousands of people went, encouraged by the extreme right of Vox, to the PSOE headquarters in those cities. In Madrid, for example, a protest was recorded for the tenth consecutive day in the vicinity of the party’s central office, in which slogans were once again chanted against the investiture pact and against the figure of Sánchez.
By Armando G. Tejeda
