The Madrid Charter: the PAN exposed
La Jornada Editorial
On Thursday, 15 senators of the National Action Party (PAN) met with the leader of the Spanish ultra-right Vox, Santiago Abascal. During the meeting, which took place in the offices of the PAN’s parliamentary caucus, the legislators signed the Madrid Charter, a document promoted by the fascist party to bring together political and social leaders in the fight against the advance of communism in the Iberosphere. According to the Charter, part of the region is held hostage by totalitarian regimes of communist inspiration, supported by drug trafficking and third countries. The document therefore calls for the defense of the rule and supremacy of the law, the separation of branches of government, freedom of expression, and private property.
Although the PAN’s leadership disassociated itself from the position of its legislators and affirmed that the senators attended in a personal capacity, the meeting had an official character as it was called and presided over by the coordinator of the PAN’s senate caucus, Julen Rementería. By the same token, the terms in which PAN leadership took its distance from the meeting are questionable to say the least, since they do not reject either the content of the Charter nor the support given by its legislators to a person who has made excuses for genocide, but rather the wrong interpretations that may have been made of this event.
No matter how much the flagship party of the Mexican right tries to dilute the seriousness of the misrepresentation by its legislators, the truth is that more than half of its senators expressed their support to a party that has among its banners the criminal prosecution of all political dissidents in matters of national identity; the suppression of the autonomous communities, and the annulment of the regional judicial systems to install a centralism in open violation of local sovereignties (which is somewhat ironic for those who, in Mexico, claim to be defenders of federalism); the political restoration of Francoism through the repeal of the Law of Historical Memory; the immediate expulsion of all undocumented immigrants, even if they are minors; religious intolerance in what its supporters understand as the protection of Europe’s Christian identity; the idea that the Law of Gender Violence makes men guilty solely for being men; the cancellation of the rights won by the LGBT community; and the attack on women’s reproductive rights for considering abortion a moral and legal aberration.
But the signing of the Madrid Charter not only shows the retrograde, authoritarian, and submissive nature of a good part of the Mexican opposition, it also reveals the inability of the right-wing forces in the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic to articulate ideological and political programs in keeping with pulse of contemporary society. By calling to fight the non-existent danger of the advance of communism in what they hispanocentrically call the Iberosphere, Vox and the PAN show such an absolute disconnection from reality that they take a bipolar approach to the world that died three decades ago as the axis of their political activity.
It is clear that the effective realization of the rule and supremacy of the law, the separation of branches of government, and freedom of expression, in whose name the PAN and its new allies pretend to speak, requires leaving behind the anachronistic language of the cold war and raising the tone of the public debate in order to avoid getting bogged down in absurdities and being mislaid.
Source: La Jornada, Saturday, September 4, 2021
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2021/09/04/edito