As it does every January, the Spanish government has just announced the legislative priorities for the year ahead and, oh, what a surprise, the planned amendment to the Penal Code to reduce sentences for sedition has been completely dropped from the legislative initiatives of the Pedro Sánchez executive, despite the commitment made to the Catalan pro-independence parties that they would do just this when they arrived at the government palace in early 2020. If, at the end of last summer, the executive excused itself from including it because the priorities at that time were economic reform and the legislative changes necessary to deal with Covid - a real misconception because none of this was done - now, the Spanish minister for the prime minister's department, Félix Bolaños, is even drier: he simply said that it is not on the agenda.
Thus, Spain will maintain its legal anachronism in comparison with the penal codes of its European neighbours, where an equivalent of "sedition without violence" is not found anywhere in the law. It is exactly this problem and nothing else that the Supreme Court has repeatedly butted up against when issuing extradition orders for the Catalan pro-independence leaders in different European countries and, in all of them, obtaining the same result, contrary to the interests of Spanish justice. On at least a couple of occasions, Comuns MP Jaume Asens managed to bring the Socialists to the verge of putting the legal change demand on the agenda, but in the end it fell off.
Partly, this is because European comparative law would not require a reduction of sedition sentences, but the striking out of the offence altogether if there has been no violence. And this is not to make a joke of a situation in which the PSOE is on the defensive, the Spanish right has a much stronger position with Spanish public opinion and the Catalan pro-independence forces are too distracted by their domestic battles and ineffective in maintaining the pressure on the Spanish government. The Council of Europe was forthright last summer when it called on Spain to amend the sedition law and called for the release of the prisoners convicted for the Catalan referendum through government pardons, which was eventually done.
With the elections in the autonomous community of Castilla y León called for next February, the possibility of a snap vote in Andalusia if the polls suit the PP leader Juan Manuel Moreno, and municipal elections across the Spanish state in May 2023, the probability of changes in the Spanish government's behaviour with respect to Catalonia is very small, if not zero. This is already seen with the so-called dialogue table, an instrument that is already past its expiry date when before the summer it was given a life expectancy of one or two years. No one believes that it will solve anything, least of all the political conflict between Spain and Catalonia, or that there might be an agreement on the amnesty, the referendum and the right to self-determination.
If that moment ever existed - and I do not believe it did - it is over. Now the PSOE is all about trying to prevent votes escaping to the right and managing the defeats it may have in order to reach the next Spanish general election alive. And those other things, in another legislature, we will see.