“Tomorrow, bearing in mind the constitutional spirit of friendship, I will propose to the Council of Ministers the granting of pardon to the nine defendants in prison,” said Spanish Government President Pedro Sánchez, on Monday. The measure has been announced in a short speech, in an event that took place in the Barcelona High School, in front of 300 people.
Sánchez has pointed out that the political situation in Catalonia is insufficient and that everyone has a responsibility for it, that one option is to remain in “disagreement”, but that another is to leave that behind and wager on “friendship”: “That is what the Government of Spain has done”, he said. Sánchez relates pardons with coexistence: "The fundamental reason for the pardons that we are going to accept is their usefulness for coexistence. I am convinced that the release of these nine people representing thousands of Catalans is a strong message in favour of the consensus and coexistence of Spanish democracy.”
Free ideas... the boundary constitution
The Spanish President has explained that he does not ask the pardoners to put aside their ideas, but he has made it a condition for the dialogue that the Catalan and Spanish governments will have to begin: approval of the “constitutional framework”. The title of his speech was illustrative in this sense: Regrouping: A future project for the whole of Spain. He tells the right-wing unionism that he is against the pardons that he understands and accepts that opposition, but he asks him also to accept that the pardons be legal. Vox, Citizens and pp have announced that they will submit resources.
Amnesty
The alleged beneficiary of the pardons is independence, but he has taken the news with criticism. Outside the Lyceum hundreds of demonstrators have concentrated on demanding amnesty for demonstrators. In the Liceo there has been no representative of the Govern ment, nor of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Although critically, the only independence force that has supported the pardon has so far been ERC, and mostly Oriol junqueras. In a letter published on 7 June, which provoked an earthquake in independence, he defended pardons and questioned unilaterality. During the weekend, he assured that the pardons were a "victory" because they "manifest" the weaknesses of Spain. During the weekend, the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonés, and the former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, declared that the pardons "are not the solution to the political conflict" and called for amnesty and self-determination. JxCAT appeared in Belgium to recall, among other things, that pardons leave out the independence leaders exiled in the United Kingdom.
The Cup has stressed that the people prosecuted by the independence process are over 3,000 and cannot be left aside in the act it has organized alongside the Liceo during Sánchez’s speech. “Mr Pedro Sánchez, you have not come well to the Catalan countries. You are part of the problem,” said the Cup spokesman at the event, “Pardons are not a solution. They are a political resentment in the face of the political conflict”, of Arrate. -No modesty or performance; 3,000 retaliation and freedom, independence," proclaimed the ANC. On the same day Òmnium Cultural presented 200 000 signatures in favour of amnesty at the Congress of Deputies in Madrid.
The word of Sanchez
A member of the juvenile independence organization Arran has risen from the seat and interrupted Sánchez’s speech just at the time the president announced the pardons. The young man took a flag in his hand and cried out against pardons and in favour of amnesty.
? Militant d'@arran_jovent fa boikot a l'acte de @sanchezcastejon. Do not volem els seus indults, amnesty per totes retaliate! pic.twitter.com/45sYLVXgr0
— Arran (@Arran_jovent) June 21, 2021