Pedro Sánchez imitates Franco: he wants to impose government fines for reasons of opinion

@ElentirENG ES 9·03·2023 · 7:00 0

One of the differences between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in the former there is the right to free expression of ideas and opinions.

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The rights to free expression of ideas that the Constitution protects

In a democracy, abuses of this right can only be determined by the courts, in a process with all judicial guarantees for the accused person. On the contrary, in a dictatorship the political power attributes the power to impose government sanctions for reasons of opinion, preventing those sanctioned from obtaining judicial protection in that process and, in fact, turning these sanctions into a threat to those who disagree with the government.

In 1978, when the Spaniards approved the Spanish Constitution in a referendum, they established two clear dams against possible abuses of political power in that area. One of them is Article 16:

"Ideological, religious and cult freedom of individuals and communities is guaranteed without further limitation, in their manifestations, than that necessary for the maintenance of public order protected by law."

The other is Article 20:

"1. Rights are recognized and protected:

a) To freely express and disseminate thoughts, ideas and opinions through words, writing or any other means of reproduction.

(...)

2. The exercise of these rights cannot be restricted by any type of prior censorship".

When the government dictated in Spain what you could give your opinion and what you couldn't

During the Franco regime, there were regulations such as la law of "repression of freemasonry and communism" and the law of public order of 1959 that granted the State broad powers to determine what could be expressed and what could not and imposed arbitrary government sanctions. Many Spaniards who did not live through that dictatorship did not believe that we would have to contemplate something like this in our country ever again. Unfortunately we were wrong.

A sanctioning file that is reminiscent of the times of Franco's dictatorship

This Saturday, the government of Pedro Sánchez announced a sanctioning file against two members of Vox, the third most voted party in Spain and currently in the opposition. In both cases, these members of Vox are accused of "exalting Francoism" on social networks, in one case because a Vox affiliate took a photo of herself with a Spanish flag with the coat of arms of the Eagle of Saint John, and in the other case because a member of Vox published a message in 2018 remembering the birthday of the founder of the Legion, José Millán-Astray.

The mere announcement of a sanctioning file for reasons of opinion by a government body is something that is dangerously reminiscent of that dictatorship that Sánchez claims to abhor, but whose methods of repression of disaffected opinions he has no qualms about in imitating The standard that the government appeals to is the so-called "democratic memory law" of 2022, a norm created by the left to impose its sectarian and biased vision of history.

A left that is dedicated to praising all kinds of criminals

That law was approved by the same left that tolerates the tributes to ETA terrorists, which he has authorized in the heart of Madrid demonstrations exalting communist dictators who committed crimes of genocide and that allows there to be streets and monuments dedicated to the socialist Largo Caballero and the separatist Companys, leaders of a bloody coup d'état in 1934 against a democratic government and, in the case of Companys, responsible for the murder of 8,000 people during the Spanish Civil War.

The government violates the Constitution and could be accused of prevarication

In addition to denouncing the cynicism of this left, we must remember that the Constitution does not define the Shield of Spain, and that the coat of arms of the Eagle of Saint John appeared in the Constitution, since it was in force until 1981. Until now, not a single law has been approved that sanctions the use of that shield. There is not even any prohibition of using it in the aforementioned "democratic memory law." Let us remember that penalizing someone for doing something that is not illegal is a clear crime of prevarication, typified in Article 404 of the Penal Code:

"The authority or public official who, knowing its injustice, dictates an arbitrary resolution in an administrative matter will be punished with the penalty of special disqualification for employment or public office and for the exercise of the right to passive suffrage by time from nine to fifteen years."

On the other hand, attempting to sanction the exercise of a fundamental right with an ordinary law such as the aforementioned "democratic memory law" is openly unconstitutional, since to regulate fundamental rights and freedoms public, an organic law is required (Article 81 of the Constitution).

Likewise, sanctioning an opinion published in 2018 with a law approved in 2022 would be an attack against Article 9.3 of the Constitution, which establishes "the non-retroactivity of sanctioning provisions that are not favorable or restrictive of individual rights". Incidentally, this retroactivity that the Sánchez government intends to impose is dangerously reminiscent of what Franco did with the "law of political responsibilities" of 1939, which imposed punishments for acts prior to the approval of the law and which until At that time they had not been subject to sanctions under the laws in force.

A totalitarian law imposed by those who do not condemn the crimes of communism

Last year I already warned here that the aforementioned "democratic memory law" is a totalitarian law, despite its misleading name. A deception that is already part of the tradition of the left, which had the audacity to call a brutal communist dictatorship such as East Germany a "Democratic Republic." Let us remember that the authors of that law were the same as in 2021 they refused to support an institutional condemnation of the crimes of communism and that voted in against a European condemnation of the repression in Cuba, a communist dictatorship to which Sánchez's associates they support it without detours.

With this law, the Spanish left did not seek to consolidate a "democratic memory": what it intended was to whitewash its criminal past, impose its ideology and persecute anyone who supports a dictatorship, unless it is a communist dictatorship. This law is authoritarian and inappropriate for a democracy, as is the attitude that Pedro Sánchez and his allies have been exhibiting since they came to power.

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Photo: PSOE.