For Spain's amnesty bill, the light at the end of the tunnel is in sight. After being filibustered for two months by the People's Party (PP) in the Senate, the legislation intended to end the judicial persecution of the independence process is now entering the final stretch before it is published in the official state gazette and becomes law. The penultimate hurdle for the text was the veto by the Senate, which was passed by 149 votes to 113. After the upper house's joint constitutional and justice committee took the first step last week, this Tuesday, two days after the Catalan election, the Senate plenary has duly vetoed the law and now sends it back to the Congress of Deputies, which will have the last word. In this way, the end is reached of an eight-week obstacle course, in which the PP sought to make a lot of noise to question the amnesty through appearances of experts and delivery of multiple reports, in a strategy that has not borne all the desired fruits. Moroever, the PP has also backed down on its plan to present a case to the Constitutional Court over the amnesty alleging that it amounts to an "institutional clash" with Congress: that proposal will now be suspended. The forecast is that on Thursday, May 30th, Congress will hold the final parliamentary debate on the law and, with the same majority that approved the text earlier this year, lift the veto and definitively pass it into law.
During the plenary debate, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) spokesperson, Sara Bailac, criticized how the PP had turned the passage of the amnesty through the Senate into a "procedure marked by partisanship and parliamentary filibusterism" and reproached the conservatives for not "hesitating to harden the rules" and to "put institutions and democracy at risk". She called the veto "fruitless". "They will be able to celebrate their useless gesture as a victory, they have the right to do so, but everyone knows that their great feat will be of no use", she told the PP senators.
For his part, the Together for Catalonia (Junts) spokeperson, Josep Lluís Cleries, was "surprised" by the "newfound sensitivity over the rule of law and constitutionality" expressed by the PP in making its veto. And he left in the air a series of questions asking the conservatives if, for example, it is constitutional to "create a self-styled patriotic police", "make use of the state sewers", use "fake police reports and fake bank accounts to act against the political opponent", and "spread fake news". He also highlighted that the amnesty means an "abandonment of the repression" that should make it possible to "return to politics by devoting energy to the legitimate cause" and not to defending oneself over "crimes that are not crimes".
The PP: "The amnesty, first step towards an illiberal adulteration of democracy"
At the other end of the spectrum, the PP spokesperson in the Senate, Alicia García, was utterly scathing in her attacks on the amnesty bill. She accused the governing Socialists (PSOE) of wanting to "weaken the rule of law to please its enemies of 2017", who have now "become Sánchez's partners", and she argued that "there is no common good that justifies the amnesty", but only "the excessive ambition of a Spanish prime minister clinging to power". She presented the law as "obscene", described it as "the worst in 45 years of democracy" and lamented that it is the result of "going lame in the response to independentism". "It is the first step in the PM's populist drift towards an illiberal adulteration of our democracy", she railed.
PP backs down over "institutional clash" case in Constitutional Court
Alicia García's words came shortly after the PP had recognized that it will not go to the Constitutional Court to pursue the amnesty as a case of an institutional clash between Congress and the Senate. One of the major PP strategies, to present the differences over the amnesty law as an institutional shock that required a ruling from Spain's court of gurantees, has now, after being announced with great fanfare, come to nothing. After Congress refused to withdraw the initiative, the PP had to decide whether it would culminate the battle by going to the Constitutional Court. And the answer in the end is no. The PP has therefore registered a text this Tuesday, to be debated with urgency on Wednesday in another Senate plenary session, aimed at "suspending and, consequently, voiding" the agreement on how the conflict of parliamentary attributions was to be approached.