‘There is no error or failure here’

This Tuesday, the Government asked the PP to stop using the dark history of ETA as a political weapon and not to assume as an “error or failure” its support for the legal reform that validates for ETA prisoners the sentences they served in another country, which will make effective a sentence reduction in Spain to more than 40 ETA members.

In the press conference after the Council of Ministers, the Minister of Education and Government spokesperson, Pilar Alegría has demanded that the opposition “stop using in such a partisan and obscene way what has done so much harm to the Spanish people.” “It is outrageous that the PP uses terrorism to cover its void of proposals and leadership,” he said.

Furthermore, Alegría has denied that the Government has tried to trick the opposition into supporting said reform on up to three occasions during its parliamentary process. “On the part of the PP there have been no oversights or errors. This bill has been debated, discussed and voted on in presentation, in committee and in plenary session. Furthermore, this text is the same one that the Rajoy Government approved in this same council of ministers in 2014. The PP cannot say that it does not know what it was voting for.”he explained.

Furthermore, during his debate in Congress, Alegría recalled that the PP spokesperson criticized the Executive precisely for the fact that this reform, which is aligned with a community directive, arrived “two years late.”

In another turn of answering questions from journalists, Alegría also criticized the fact that PP figures such as Miguel Tellado or Isabel Díaz Ayuso have said that ETA is now “stronger than ever.” “When one dares to say that, the first thing one is doing is insulting the victims of terrorism and the State security forces and bodies. And insulting Spanish society as a whole. Those words can only be uttered by those who have not contributed not even the slightest to put an end to ETA,” he concluded.

Feijóo apologizes but attacks the Government

Pilar Alegría’s appearance took place minutes after the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has called it an “indignity” that the Government “used a parliamentary trick of enormous moral turpitude” to advance the release from prison of some ETA members

In an event in Guadalajara, Feijóo acknowledged that his group in the Congress of Deputies made a mistake, “but there is a moral abyss between an error in a parliamentary procedure and the deliberate will to release prisoners convicted of murders from jail. of ETA to keep Sánchez in the Government”.

For now, the PP has postponed the debate on the law that was scheduled for this Tuesday in the Senate, but it will go ahead next Monday as it is approved urgently in Congress and has not received amendments in the Upper House.