It was the most applauded intervention of the week in Congress. The deputy of the PP, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, got her ranks of the rows with a long ovation for directly accusing the president of the Government to use the Gazati children killed in search of electoral revenue. And to exercise political violence to remain in power. “Use the children of Gaza as electoral shields. Without budgets, without a majority, they only have the violence. Sunday was only the beginning,” said the deputy among cheers of her classmates in reference to the protests of the cycling return to Spain.
That serious accusation is not, from afar, the most offensive that has been pronounced in the Congress of Deputies or in acts of PP and Vox against Pedro Sánchez, but is paradigmatic of a verbal escalation of the opposition against the leader of the Executive who does not have, nor is he expected to have, brake in the courts. This week, the supreme determined that raising the hypothesis of “hanging the president by the feet”, as the leader of Vox did, is not a crime of hate or insults. And in the Socialist Party they admit, after failing their complaint, the frustration of not knowing very well how to defend themselves.
“The Supreme Judgment argues that, as the political climate is disappointed, because someone has the right to tell you that they want to hang on your feet. I do not know, sometimes we have the feeling that we will have to regret that something very fat happens so that the clear expressions of verbal violence are taken seriously,” says a high socialist leader.
What the Court has done is an extensive interpretation of freedom of expression following the doctrine that in the political sphere the sphere of protection against insults and disqualifications is reduced.
In Ferraz, from the dome of the party they remember that some serious things have already happened. “We have documented 245 attacks on socialist venues from all over the country during the last two years. Some of them with explosive artifacts, such as in Santander. We have never heard either Feijóo or anyone from their team condemn any of them or sympathize with our people. And now it turns out that the peaceful protests of the Vuelta are 'Kale Borroka' because fences were thrown. And that it is over the government.”
Socialists have been complaints about the vandalization of many of their headquarters for months. A fact accompanied by a wear strategy to the government, and its particular president, increasingly on. “Feijóo and Abascal call the president of the government constantly 'Putero'. Do you know which is the insult that appears most in the graffiti of our venues? Puteros. So of course that from their speeches the violence we have suffered for two years is derived,” says another person from the socialist direction.
Many people in the PSOE admits the difficulty of dealing with a signaling and insult strategy in which certain sectors of the right seems to be handled at pleasure. The president of the Community of Madrid, for example, has managed to make the famous 'like the fruit' as popular as a synonym for insult to Pedro Sánchez (he said 'son of a bitch' in the Congress of Deputies) that a couple of weeks ago he copied the joke himself Feijóo himself and used it on his social networks the same day of his birthday, during the celebration in a place in A Coruña. And that same shout has become even a summer song in some discos, concerts and sporting or bullfighting events that chant insults to the president of the Government.
“If you think about it, it makes no sense. Height, ”reasons a PSOE deputy in Congress, who emphasizes that the president repeats from the beginning of the political course an answer to Feijóo in his face to face Wednesday. “You have decided to dedicate yourself to insult, we govern,” he answered two consecutive weeks. “I do not insult, polarization is asymmetric,” the president said during his start -up interview in TVE.
In recent weeks, the Popular Party has referred to the President of the Government as “the greyhound of Paiporta”, in reference to when he had to leave the town affected by the Dana by the aggression of some protesters. Feijóo himself also accused him of “living from the brothels” and his right hand, Miguel Tellado, came to call “dig the pit in which the remains rest” of the Executive. In the ultra concentration last week in Madrid organized by Vox, its leader called the public to chant “Pedro Sánchez, whores cool.”
For the PSOE, the key is that the PP has decided to do follow the way of doing ultra -right policy although it needs to be carried out by any basic rule of the democratic game, such as not insulting. “There is an attempt to protect Feijóo from those ways of doing politics to show that he is not like that. But it is he who chooses that people like Ester Muñoz, Miguel Tellado, Jaime de los Santos or Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo take the singing voice in his party. He puts the most 'Hooligans' to say barbarities. And then they try to caricatrize the left as violent,”
After the murder of the ultra -right -wing controversy Charlie Kirk in the United States, the number 2 of the Popular Party, Miguel Tellado, tried to caricaturalize the attitude of the left regarding violence. “What would happen in Spain if a person of ultra -right shot dead a leftist activist shots? What would happen if a Spanish white -skinned citizen murdered a woman of foreign origin and another skin color?”
Crime of hate
The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court rejected this week the complaint for crime of hatred, insults and threats filed by the PSOE against Abascal for having affirmed in An interview in the Argentine newspaper Clarín that “there will be a moment” in which the people will want to “hang from the feet” to Sánchez. The resolution establishes that the expressions of the extreme right -wing leader show “a frontal and radical opposition to both Sánchez's person and their political management”, but do not have the entity to consider them crime, as the socialists defended.
The Supreme is very restrictive when considering politicians as passive subjects protected by the crime of hate. The jurisprudence of the high court requires that the manifestations made imply a “certain danger” of generating a climate of violence or hostility that can be realized in “specific acts of violence, hate and discrimination” to certain groups. And in those groups, according to doctrine, there are traditionally oppressed and vulnerable minorities and groups.
In this case, the judges argue that “it is not possible “Discarded”, “exaggerated” or “hateful” whatever.
The prosecutor of the hate crimes, Miguel Ángel Aguilar, explains in an interview at eldiario.es that, in the investigation of this type of crime, the first thing to value is the context in which the demonstrations occur to see if they have an impact on society. “It is also very important to take into account the profile of the person who discloses such facts and if it is a hate speech that is repeated or are point and spontaneous comments as a result of an emotional reaction. Other elements are the capacity of leadership and social penetration or the specific context of words.”
But it is also key, the fact that jurisprudence especially protects the opinions expressed in the political sphere by very offensive and unpleasant that may result. In the case of public positions, a very thorough weighting must be made between collision rights – expression or ideological book and prohibition of discrimination or free development of personality – since other constitutional rights such as political pluralism and political participation come into play.