Spain's People's Party does not support Vox in its desire to outlaw the two main Catalan pro-independence parties, Together for Catalonia (Junts) and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC). The conservative PP has refused to vote in favour of a Senate motion by the far-right party - which was left on its own - urging the Spanish government to request the illegalization of the two Catalan parties, and it accused Vox of seeking a "contrived protagonism". Without the votes of the PP, which holds an absolute majority in the Spanish upper house, Vox's motion was rejected this Tuesday.
PP senator María Yolanda Ibarrola stated that the extreme right party knew that the PP would not support the text, and she warned that the motion would not go ahead and nor would they have any success in a hypothetical illegalization through the Supreme Court, stressing that "the dissolution of a political party is one of the most serious measures that can be adopted in a democracy", as well as asserting that "political pluralism is a superior value of our system". In addition, the PP criticised Vox since there is "not a single final court sentence that endorses the intended action", referring to the accusations of terrorism raised in the National Audience court against Marta Rovira and Carles Puigdemont, among others.
"They bring this debate to the chamber trying to make themselves the focus, looking for a loudspeaker that will make them look like the greatest defenders of Spain, mostly in front of the PP. They are making a mistake. With their action, in the end the beneficiaries are Pedro Sánchez and his partners", said the PP senator, adding that her party, from the Senate, will do "everything within the law to stop the tyrannical drift of the government”. However, the main opposition party asserts that an executive cannot be stopped "by a press release, a tweet, or by proposing the impossible". In her turn to defend the motion, Vox senator Paloma Gómez asked for support for her text, defending herself with Spain's 2002 Law of Parties - passed in the context of the struggle against ETA terrorism - and appealing to "sanity and common sense" to ban parties that Vox considers "are not rivals, but are enemies of the nation". For the far right group, both the Catalan parties have "supported terrorism" and tried to "destroy the constitutional order".
The PP's María Yolanda Ibarrola: "As well, in 2020, as Vox knows, you attempted an initiative to outlaw [Basque pro-independence party] Bildu, and the PP's constitutional argument opposing that has not changed at all."
Junts and ERC: A "disgraceful" and "offensive" proposal
In turn, Junts presented a motion for total suppression of the Vox initiative, which the Catalan party described as "offensive" to the public, a "personal appreciation that belongs more to bar-room conversations than in the Senate". said senator Josep Lluís Cleries, adding that "Junts has never supported any terrorist act" and dismissing the motion as an "expression of hatred" against "democratic, peaceful and regular" political parties.
Despite not presenting any amendment to the text, ERC criticized the initiative as "disgraceful". "They fail to defeat us at the polls, and that's why they want to remove us from the political map", said the ERC spokesperson, Sara Bailac. In her opinion, what Santiago Abascal's party is seeking is to "prohibit" Catalans from "imagining a better future". "We will continue to defend ourselves, because voting is not a crime and being pro-independence is a right".