It is 12:00 o’clock and a flood of constitutional and European flags is still coming down Serrano, Alcalá, Paseo de El Prado, Gran Vía and Alfonso XII. On the banks of the Retiro the buses rest like stranded barges. Beyond Colón, almost a kilometer away, the hubbub fades away. The concentration extends in all directions from Cibeles as the center of the protest.
According to the organizers, the event has brought together around a million people. The Government Delegation, for its part, estimates it at 170,000 attendees, more than double the 80,000 that it claimed had gathered last Sunday, also in Madrid, at the demonstration called by the PP.
There is less crowding than on other occasions, but the continuous trickle has an effect: tens of thousands of people are filling the Plaza de Cibeles in Madrid and its surroundings. The blue of the community insignia contrasts with Ferraz’s riots, where anathemas against the EU fly.
It is 12:00 o’clock on all the clocks of self-proclaimed “constitutionalism”, which explodes in a univocal cry against the amnesty: “Not in my name!”. More than a hundred associations and civil society forums have said enough and have organized the large demonstration against the pacts of Pedro Sánchez and the independentists of Junts and ERC.
Without party acronyms, but with the presence of the PP and Vox leadership, this Saturday’s protest in Madrid has been designed as the central axis of the response against the agreements to erase the crimes of the process. This Saturday an enormous torrent of civic energy condensed around the Plaza de Cibeles against the investiture tolls.
Having already averted the danger of having collapsed in the previous protests, the protesters have burst into a standing ovation for Alejo Vidal-Quadras to unseal the event. The former president of the Catalan PP and founder of Vox is recovering from the shot in the face that he suffered a week ago. From the main stage he has echoed through the public address system the tweet with which he has given proof of his recovery: “Sanchism turns the electoral adversary into an enemy to be expelled from the system through the destruction of basic constitutional consensus.”
But the most enthusiastic shouts at the beginning of the demonstration were not those, but “Pedro Sánchez, son of a bitch!”, or its euphemistic synonym “I like fruit!”. They have repeated the latter insistently to its author, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, upon her arrival in Cibeles. Later, the well-known “Puigdemont to prison!”, later escalated to “Pedro Sánchez, to prison!”, made a fortune.
“We are not going to have any type of fear,” Feijóo has harangued his people in his statements to the media. “It is one thing to have the power and another to be right. It is one thing to have obtained enough support, but they know that they do not have the votes to do what they are doing,” he stressed.
“I know that right now, in this square, there are also many socialists” like him, said Félix Ovejero, ELMUNDO columnist, who are ashamed of a PSOE that is “clinically dead.” And Andrés Trapiello – also a prominent author of this newspaper – has stressed that “the buying and selling” of the State has uncovered a divisive operation of the PSOE: “Sánchez wants to drive us crazy” with “an amnesty that is an eyesore.” “His personal ambition for him has no limits or scruples,” he added.
Albert Boadella has warned that Spain “is on the way to ending up in a dictatorship”. “Fuck me!” finished the playwright.
The manifesto of the hundred convening associations emphasizes that with “the approval of the unconstitutional amnesty and the future referendum for independence, a new phase of a process is entered that puts at certain risk the very existence of Spain as a space to guarantee our rights.” and freedoms and as a multi-secular historical entity”. “We cannot remain impassive in the face of it,” he adds. “We risk being or not being,” she adds.
Fernando Savater has closed the speeches. “If someone wants to leave, let them go, but don’t take anything,” summarized the philosopher and columnist. “Puigdemont must be escorted, it seems good to me: he must be escorted, taken to Alcalá-Meco and left there,” he added, before proclaiming: “This is the first step of a resistance that has to continue.”
In response to questions from the press, Santiago Abascal has revealed that he has asked Feijóo for a meeting to articulate a joint response and analyze the possibilities that the Senate has of stopping the amnesty law.
And he added that “we cannot give up the battle as lost, we must continue resisting with sustained social mobilization, provide a coordinated institutional response in the regions where there is no coup majority, in the Senate and communicate to all our international allies what is what is happening in Spain with the attack on the independence of powers, on the equality of Spaniards and on the Constitution”.
For her part, Isabel Díaz Ayuso has called for everyone to “stop what is happening in Spain.” “They are taking us to an extreme and meaningless situation never seen in democracy and the damage is irreversible.”