Thousands of professors, intellectuals, businessmen, economists, engineers and lawyers who defend constitutionalism have signed a manifesto released this Monday, at the start of the King’s round of consultations with the parties, in which they ask the PP and the PSOE to “recover political cordiality” and open a dialogue process with a view to the investiture to prevent the governability of Spain from depending on “extreme or pro-independence options”.
The letter, just four paragraphs written by the Consensus and Regeneration platform, urges the two majority parties to “engage in a dialogue aimed at forging government or legislature agreements, where ideological diversity and pluralism are not an obstacle to understanding and agreeing fundamental policies in the interest of all Spaniards and of our own democracy”.
The businessman Joaquín Villanueva, coordinator of the platform, explains to EL MUNDO that there are two reasons that explain this manifesto. The first is “not to be a shameful country and make a fool of yourself, because the formation of a government in Spain with a fugitive from Justice [Carles Puigdemont] that Spain itself is demanding is an enormous contradiction.”
“What are the Belgian judges who have to decide on the extradition of this fugitive going to think when they see that it is the government of Spain that decides?” Villanueva asks, pointing to a second reason: “Spain also needs an agreement to carry out reforms such as education or pensions, which can only be done with the help of the two big parties”.
Among the signatories of the manifesto are personalities of different political sensibilities, from the founders of Ciudadanos Francesc de Carreras and Félix Ovejero to socialists such as the former MEP Pedro Bofill or the former Defense Minister Eduardo Serra. There are also people linked to the PP, such as the architect Paloma Sobrini or the former president of the Catalan Civil Society Fernando Sánchez Costa.
The letter is also signed by the president of the Assembly for a Bilingual School, Ana Losada; the coordinator of the Teachers’ Forum, Carlos Conde, and the president of Impulso Ciudadano, José Domingo, who defends that “Spain does not deserve a government conditioned by those who want to break the constitutional agreement” and states that “great evils (politics of blocks), great remedies (structural agreements between the constitutional parties)”.
In addition, the manifesto was signed by professors Pablo de Lora, Teresa Freixes, Francisco Sosa Wagner, José María Oller and Benito Arruñada; the editors Miguel Aguilar and Miriam Tey; the diplomat and columnist for EL MUNDO Juan Claudio de Ramón; the writer José María Marco; businessmen Jaime Carvajal, Joaquín Tamames, Joaquín Güell, José Rosiñol, Alejandro Rodríguez-Carmona and Luis Camilleri; the economists Fernando Baldellou and Javier Santacruz and the lawyers Juan Luis Sánchez de Muniain and Alfonso Ruiz de Assin, among others.
This is the fourth manifesto that Consensus and Regeneration has issued to request the consensus of the two major parties. On previous occasions they have sent their proposals to the parliamentary groups of Congress. This has been brought to the attention of the PP and the PSOE, with the hope that they “sit down and negotiate.” “We do not go into how they should do it. They can reach an agreement so that one is president and another is vice president or that they divide the legislature for two years each or that they abstain in the investiture of the other. Any combination will be much better than the PSOE forms a government with a fugitive,” says Villanueva.
He is aware that “the manifesto is not going to help at all”, because neither the PSOE nor the PP want to facilitate the investiture of the opposing party, but, even so, he considers that “someone has to say that this is crazy”. Above all because the bipartisanship “has grown in votes and seats” while “the parties that represent extreme or pro-independence options have significantly reduced” their support at the polls. “For this reason,” the manifesto argues, “it would be contradictory for the governance of Spain to end up depending on the latter.”
“We must leave behind the trends of the past political cycle that have increased polarization, have given rise to political blockades and have deteriorated our democracy, subjecting it to marked institutional stress. Likewise, certain reforms and State policies that require cross-cutting consensus cannot continue to be delayed “, maintain the signatories, convinced that “there is much more that brings us together as Spaniards than what separates us”.
“At the present time, the debate is between liberal democracy and populism. We Spaniards need a government that is committed to complying with and enforcing the law and begins a task of rebuilding coexistence that is very necessary. After the last elections, the The only way to achieve this objective is an agreement between the two majority parties. The alternative means de facto excluding almost half of the voters”, emphasizes Rafael Arenas, professor of International Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and another of the signatories.
