Two and a half months after Pedro Sánchez took five days to reflect, the President of the Government will today unveil the plan for democratic regeneration to which he committed himself after considering that it was “worthwhile” to continue at the head of the Executive. Once the electoral scenario has been cleared, following the European elections and with enough time to articulate a proposal that will allow him to politically dress up the “full stop” he announced, Sánchez will today officially present this agenda of reforms in a special appearance in the Congress of Deputies.
Government sources are lowering expectations to a minimum and avoiding any specific measures, assuring that what the president will articulate in his speech today will be a “skeleton”, a “very general” outline of priorities that will be sought to be given content with the parliamentary groups in a round of contacts that will begin in September. While waiting for Sánchez to make some major announcement, which is usual in this type of meeting, the truth is that the aspiration of this morning’s intervention is limited to “opening a debate” that will be completed later with the contributions of the rest of the partners, whose support is essential for any initiative to prosper.
Sánchez’s entourage does clarify, however, that there is no intention of promoting a regime to regulate the figure of the consort of the head of the Executive. The regenerative impulse of the Government is born flawed from the beginning and conditioned by the personal situation that Sánchez himself is going through, since the presidential reflection period was induced by the judicial horizon of his wife. Not in vain, it began the same day that she was informed of her status as an investigated person. However, it is not planned to advance in a regulation on the limits of the professional activity of the president’s spouse, which socialist sources define as a very “complex” matter to articulate and that, in practice, would mean as much as recognizing that the development of Begoña Gómez’s private activity has generated distortions in the governmental and public exercise of her husband.
Sánchez has, however, been advancing over the last few weeks some of the lines of action he intends to promote to prevent the “pseudo-media”, as he defines them, from playing a leading role in the generation and dissemination of “fake news”. The Government had already announced its intention to modify the law on the right to honour and rectification, in addition to the proposal to reform the law on institutional advertising to include “a maximum of public funding for the media” and deprive those who violate the codes of ethics in journalistic activity of this funding.
The government’s objective is to put a stop to media outlets “that only have public resources, not readers, which puts their independence at risk,” argued the president. The recently approved European regulation that seeks to provide greater transparency and independence to the media will also be applied. Precisely, having placed the media in the spotlight has generated suspicions about the government’s interventionism in freedom of information, which is why, as LA RAZÓN has been able to find out, Sánchez met yesterday – on the eve of his appearance in Congress – with the presidents of the FAPE and APM journalists’ associations to give them the details of the plan that is intended to be promoted. The government maintains that any initiative that is undertaken will have the essential European endorsement.
Until now, the regeneration agenda has been worked on within the governing coalition with Sumar and it has been this party that has broken the secrecy in the negotiations to convey that the initiative that was already agreed in September 2022 to suppress the crime against religious feelings or public ridicule, the repeal of crimes against the Crown and insults to the Government of the Nation, the General Council of the Judiciary, the Constitutional Court and the Army would be resumed. The socialist side is more cautious and cannot confirm any concrete proposal. We are open to reviewing some crimes, “but without a wording,” they point out.
With his regeneration agenda, Sánchez intends to raise a firewall to avoid assuming any political responsibility, but the truth is that the case affecting Begoña Gómez is already having a negative impact on the Executive and the PSOE, who are unable to close this issue and are entrenched in their refusal to give explanations and respond to the narrative that the accusations are managing to establish.