Cynical Conde-Pumpido

When you know you are part of a repressive state and that your actions will be met with impunity, you can pretty much say whatever you want, and that is exactly what Candido Conde-Pumpido just did regarding the banning of the nationalist Basque electoral lists by the out of the closet fascist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Here you have a note published by EITB about this topic:

Politics

Public Prosecutor: "We possibly went too far, but it washed"

05/17/2007

Candido Conde-Pumpido voiced his doubts on their intervention barring so many lists of candidates for local and regional elections, since "there are towns in which there is practically no list of candidates left."

Spain's Public Prosecutor, Candido Conde-Pumpido, said he didn't know if "we have gone too far" after banning so many lists of candidates supposedly linked to outlawed Batasuna. The process culminated on Wednesday as the Supreme Court barred the registration of ASB (Union of Socialist Nationalists) as a political party at the Interior Ministry. As Conde-Pumpido said, there are towns in which there are "almost no lists of candidates. We possibly went too far, but it washed," he said, to highlight later that both the Supreme and Constitutional Courts endorsed his interpretation abiding by Parties' Law.

At an informative breakfast, Conde-Pumpido affirmed that in the process to hinder Batasuna's presence in elections what worked was "scalpel, and not garrotte. We removed the tumour, without hurting the patient."

The State's Public Prosecutor assured that some people believe the Parties' Law is "some kind of electoral Guantanamo," where there are 150,000 people that can't vote, even if the target of this law is "to push towards peace, and not towards violence." "The Parties' Law doesn't say that Batasuna's voters can't vote" and noted that if every time they vote for a list it has to be outlawed "we are pushing them towards violence," even if the law aims at integrating even those who reject a democratic system into it.

Anyway, he warned that Public Prosecution will be on the alert to see if there are judicially relevant circumstances that can be considered as a reason to outlaw a party. He specified that the public petition by Batasuna for the ballot for ANV (Basque Nationalist Action) is not a sufficient reason for its outlawing, citing the case of the Communist Party of the Basque Lands, legal leftwing nationalist party with representation in the Basque Parliament.

And some idiots insist on calling Spain a democracy.

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