Felipe González was one of the international leaders who publicly demanded the release of the Venezuelan opponent Leopoldo López, who spent more than three years in prison until his release in 2017. The former president of the Spanish Government took advantage this Monday of the loudspeaker that gave him the presentation of a book based on these events – They Want Us Dead (Espasa), by Javier Moro – to vindicate the value of freedom and democracy above ideological differences and, incidentally, their right to express what they think.
“There is a problem of ageism here. Now, when you are my age, you can no longer speak, they prohibit you from speaking. Once I take the microphone, how much I enjoy it,” he joked before the public gathered at the Ateneo de Madrid in a implicit criticism of his own party for criticizing the fact that he has opposed the possibility of Pedro Sánchez acceding to the demand of ERC and Junts to grant amnesty to those involved in the illegal 1-O consultation, a position that has been described as “disloyal “from Ferraz’s own dome.
Upon leaving the event, González said that in the “next few days” he will also speak out about the call for an independence referendum in Catalonia, which is another of the requirements imposed by the pro-independence parties in exchange for their votes so that the president of the acting Government can remain at the head of La Moncloa for another term. However, he has already anticipated that he considers it a “joke.”
“I am repelled by that right or that left that distinguishes regimes by the color they present. Dictatorships are dictatorships, tyrants are tyrants,” the politician who led the refoundation of the PSOE in Suresnes 50 years ago. “The day we all agree on that it will be easier to coordinate and move forward,” he added.
Without explicitly mentioning it, González has also censured those who, like former socialist president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, are trying to “whitewash” Nicolás Maduro, whom he has said “would not resist even half-free elections,” and which he has differentiated from his predecessor as president of Venezuela. “Hugo Chávez had real leadership; he could lose, like he lost a referendum, but he won at the polls,” he added in contrast to the “control and repression” that he, he has denounced, has now been established in Venezuela.
Leopoldo López himself and his wife, Lilian Tintori, attended the presentation of Javier Moro’s book. Both have appreciated the support they received from the former president of Spain between 1982 and 1996 during the years that the opponent spent locked up.
Also present at the event were Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, former Minister of Justice and former mayor of Madrid; José Manuel García-Margallo, former head of the Foreign Affairs portfolio; and the deputy Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, all of them members of the PP. Among the audience was also Nicolás Redondo Terreros, recently expelled as a member of the PSOE, and the former leader of UGTCándido Méndez.
On this same stage of the Ateneo, González participated two weeks ago in the presentation of the book La Rosa y las espinas. The man behind the politician (La Esfera), written by his former right-hand man at the Moncloa Palace, Alfonso Guerra. Distanced for years, both have now been united again by the disagreement with a party that they no longer recognize as the one they refounded half a century ago due to the possibility of paying the political price of concessions to the independentists in exchange for support for the investiture of Sánchez.
“One can defend the ideas that one wants, but what one cannot do is skip legality. The amnesty is not constitutional. It does not fit, just as self-determination does not fit,” warned the former president of the Government during his speech at said event. In this sense, he pointed out that its application would mean “erasing” the crimes of those who “in two days destroyed the Statute [of autonomy of Catalonia] and the Constitution”, that “the legitimacy of those who tried to defend it would be taken away” and that he does not know no democratic country that introduces an element of “self-destruction of its unity and integrity.”