Yolanda Díaz: five embarrassing minutes avoiding any criticism of the Chinese dictatorship

The communist vice president of the Spanish government, Yolanda Díaz, was interviewed this morning by Carlos Alsina on Onda Cero.

Pedro Sánchez doesn't call for human rights in China, but he proposes a measure that would weaken democracies at the UN
An opaque operation to tie Spain to the world's largest authoritarian regime

At the end of the interview, Alsina asked Díaz: “Are human rights respected in China?” It is a very simple question, and anyone even minimally informed would answer with a resounding “NO.” For five awkward minutes, Díaz avoided answering, trying to change the subject (he started talking about Israel and the United States) and appealing to the UN, perhaps forgetting that in 2022 the United Nations documented “serious human rights violations” in China, specifically in the province of Xinjiang against the Uyghurs.

Here you can watch the video of the interview (it’s in Spanish; you can enable automatic Spanish subtitles in the bottom bar of the player). The question about Communist China comes at the 26:58 mark; I’ve set the video to start playing at that point. One of the vice president’s most astonishing statements is that she acknowledged that “China does not have a multiparty system,” a crude euphemism to avoid saying that it is a one-party dictatorship, where there have never been free elections and where any criticism of the government leads to persecution, imprisonment, torture, and even the execution of dissidents.

Thus, Spain has a government that has no qualms about leveling the harshest criticism against democratic countries such as the United States and Israel, a country that the Sánchez government has repeatedly accused of “genocide” without any condemnation of those crimes against the Israeli government. However, when it comes to the Chinese dictatorship, the Sánchez government falls silent, simply because today it is Spain’s main international ally—to Spain’s shame.

Of course, the appointment of the second vice president of the government comes as no surprise. For many years, Yolanda Díaz has been a member of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), a party that has shown its support for dictatorships such as Belarus, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Vietnam, and that four years ago published a manifesto repeating the Kremlin’s lies and slogans about Ukraine.

As I have been pointing out for some time, Spain is the only country in the European Union that has communists in its government. This leads to such embarrassing incidents as those five minutes during which Yolanda Díaz avoided any criticism of a dictatorship like China, a one-party regime that systematically violates human rights. The Sánchez government is an anomaly among European democracies; it is a government that feels closer to a totalitarian regime like communist China than to a consolidated democracy like the United States.

In fact, the so-called "democratic memory" that Sánchez proclaims implies a total amnesty for communist crimes, as we already saw five years ago when Sánchez and his allies voted against the European condemnation of the crimes of communism and nazism, simply because they refused to condemn communist crimes. In this sense, what is clear is that Sánchez's repeated rejection of the Franco regime is not because it was a dictatorship (China is also a dictatorship and the current Spanish government refuses to call it that, just as it does with other dictatorships like Cuba and Venezuela), but because it was not a left-wing dictatorship, the type of dictatorship that historical leaders of the PSOE openly defended.

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Photo: Europa Press. Yolanda Díaz at a public event of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) on September 25, 2021 in Rivas-Vaciamadrid (Madrid).