A few minutes after this Monday the ETA inmates’ collective published a statement in which they admitted that the greetings that are made to inmates when they leave the prison permanently cause “pain”, the response from Citizens was already resounding: “It is not chance”. A premise that party sources repeat and that has been reproduced a day later in Congress, during the debate on the law of “protection of victims of terrorism” proposed by Cs.

The initiative, which had already been rejected by the Socialists on Tuesday morning, has not gone ahead as it only had the votes in favor of PP, Vox, UPN and Foro Asturias. In total, the proposal received a total of 179 votes against, 143 in favor, and one abstention. Guillermo Díaz, Cs deputy, who has defended the bill in the hemicycle, has directly blamed the Government from the podium: “We bring a law to prohibit homages to murderers, and the PSOE calls the murderers to say no they want more tributes in public ”.

Ciudadanos had marked on the agenda for the plenary session this Tuesday by one of its star measures: the proposal of the Law of Memory, Dignity, Dignity and Reparation of All Victims of Terrorism. The norm asks, among other things, to prohibit precisely the tributes to ETA express, the so-called Welcome. But the parliamentary group of Citizens has rejected this Tuesday to leave the initiative behind despite the statement published by the ETA express group (the self-styled EPPK by its acronym in Basque), as its spokesperson in Congress, Edmundo Bal, had underlined hours before of the debate: “[El comunicado] it is an absolutely unworthy maneuver to enable the socialist party to have an excuse to vote against our law ”.

The words of the Cs deputy were the prelude to a harsh debate, plagued by accusations from both intervening parties, on behalf of who was more entitled to speak or not on behalf of the victims of terrorism. And in that sense Guillermo Díaz has started his speech in the hemicycle. The parliamentarian began his defense of the bill by expressly alluding to the confrontation that he starred with the socialist Odón Elorza last Wednesday: “My father [militar] buried companions. Do not disavow me again to speak of ETA for not having been an orphan. Any Spanish can speak ETA. Be ashamed ”. Díaz’s intervention, which has reiterated the need to shield the tributes by law, has been plagued with direct accusations to the Government, which he has harshly criticized for its negotiations with Bildu. “The real price for budget support is this. A few hours before the vote, someone has picked up the phone and told the ETA members that the tributes now, better, in private, ”he snapped at the Socialist bench.

The speech of the Cs parliamentarian has ended amid applause from his party colleagues and the deputies of PP and Vox. Santiago Abascal, standing, has even slapped Díaz on the back, who has also received the hug of another parliamentarian from the extreme right, General Alberto Asarta, expressly mentioned by Díaz in his speech. An address in which the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, called Díaz to order when the Cs deputy directly indicated to the PSOE to “call the murderers” a day before. “You cannot insult members of this House with the qualifications you are using,” Batet has reproached him.

The statement published by the ETA express has been heard in the plenary session of the EH Bildu deputy in Congress, Mertxe Aizpurua, who has described the one taken by EPPK as a “transcendental step”. The deputy, who has read extracts of the letter in Spanish, has accused the rights of “using the pain and suffering of the victims.” A slow intervention, in which Aizpurua has asked to move forward “for the reparation of all the victims” and recalled the statement made by Arnaldo Otegui last October 18 on the tenth anniversary of the end of ETA. “Let’s leave behind the tension and hatred,” stressed the spokeswoman for Bildu. Edmundo Bal has asked to withdraw “the words of ETA” from the journal of sessions.

Relatives of victims

The positions of Vox and PP, which have supported the Citizens’ Law, have been defended by relatives of victims of terrorism, Antonio Salvá and Jaime Miguel Mateu, respectively. Both have harshly criticized the Government for its opposition to the initiative and have reiterated, like Cs, their rejection of the Executive’s negotiations with Bildu. “[Por] agree with the heirs of ETA, your hands are stained with blood “, said Salvá, who has also accused the PP of” ramming so that ETA prisoners leave the jails “for applying the Bolinaga doctrine. And he has also hugged Diaz after his plea.

“The debate and approval of the Budgets has been the exercise of the greatest affront and reluctance for the victims of terrorism,” added the popular Mateu. The deputy has clarified that his party has a draft organic law in which it is also expected to pursue the Welcome. “Still in this hemicycle there is an unbreathable stench since the Accounts have been approved with the support of Bildu, of the heirs of ETA,” he has sentenced.

On the other hand, the deputy of Compromís, Joan Baldoví, and that of the PSOE, Patxi López, have disfigured the “capitalization” of the pain of the victims to the right. “No one can ever put themselves in the shoes of a person who has lost a direct relative,” remarked Baldoví, who has also been warned by the president. “Today we have witnessed a new chapter of that championship that maintains the rights to see who is the one that most and best insults the Government and the Socialists. It is nothing more than a regrettable way of understanding politics, in which the first lesson should be that not everything goes to attack the adversary ”, has criticized López, who has confirmed that they are already working from the Government to harden the precepts with the who agree. The Basque deputy has settled the debate by praising the meaning of the ETA express statement. “It is the victory of the victims and of social pressure over something that could not be tolerated.”

The PSOE’s refusal to face the Citizens’ proposal does nothing but further strain the relations between the formation of Inés Arrimadas and the Government, which have been broken for months. “With the partners who have freely chosen, we are not going around the corner with this government,” says a leader of Cs.