The conservative Spanish People’s Party (Partido Popular – EPP) sought on Tuesday (13 February) to quell the fallout caused by media reports that its conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo would be willing to grant conditional pardons to several Catalan separatist leaders.
The ruling Socialist Party controversially agreed last year to pardon via an amnesty law pro-independence Catalan politicians from the right-wing Together for Catalonia (JxCat) and the left-wing Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), currently in the regional government (Generalitat).
The aim was to secure enough support for a government with the progressive platform Sumar.
Politicians from the Catalan separatist parties, including former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, had been charged with sedition over an unauthorised independence referendum in 2017.
The amnesty law led to massive protests in Spain, with right-wing groups particularly angry at Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
Now it turns out the PP leadership had briefly studied the amnesty before rejecting it and that Feijóo may be in favour of granting pardons to Catalan separatists, but on several conditions: accountability to the judiciary and renunciation of the referendum and unilateralism, Spanish media reported.
Although he did not deny these reports, Feijóo insisted on Sunday that the PP was against the amnesty and stressed that no conditions for a pardon have been met yet.
“I have said no, I have said no, and I will continue to say no to any amnesty (…) I have said and I will continue to say no to any kind of pardon because not one of the conditions for a possible pardon has been met,” Feijóo said.
Smear campaign
But the fact that the PP had met with the leadership of the hardline pro-independence Catalan party JxCat to consider the amnesty law and Feijóo favouring “reconciliation with the separatists” seems to contradict the PP’s public stance.
At several rallies to protest against the amnesty law, Feijóo said that all those charged in the wake of the independence referendum in October 2017 should be taken to court and serve their sentences.
The discrepancy is now a headache for the PP leadership, because of the difficulty in justifying it to its “core” voters, several party sources told EFE.
The PP’s parliamentary spokesman Miguel Tellado has said that Feijóo’s position regarding the amnesty had been taken out of context and that “there is an orchestrated campaign by certain media outlets (…) to present a certain relationship between the PP and the Catalan independence movement when there is not and has not been” any such negotiations.
In addition, Tellado denounced what he said was a “smear campaign by the PSOE” and has also accused far-right Vox of “campaigning so that the PP does not do well”.
Several regional PP leaders, including the president of Andalucía, the Madrid region, and the Valencia Community have come out in support of Feijóo, pointing out that he had always rejected the amnesty and the pardon.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
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