Aznar says that the transfer of immigration is much more serious than the "coup d'état" of 1-O

BarcelonaThe PP has already shown its firm opposition to the State delegating immigration powers to the Generalitat and this Monday one of the party's heavyweights did so. The former president of the Spanish government and former leader of the PP, José María Aznar, has stated that the transfer of immigration agreed between the PSOE and Junts is worse than 1-O. "I will say it very clearly: what has happened is much more serious than the coup d'état of 2017. Much more serious. It is not that Catalonia wants to leave Spain, it is that Spain is leaving Catalonia," he said in an interview with the newspaper El País.Abc.

In this sense, Aznar has not mince his words when it comes to assuring that both the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, and the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, are accomplices "of a policy of destruction of the State." With an apocalyptic speech, he denounced that these pacts lead to the future dissolution of Spain, although he added that it is reversible. "We must be willing to pay the cost of the reversal […], because the alternative is dissolution. I am not willing to see the dissolution of the Spanish nation, the conversion of the Spanish nation into three or four nations, nor the dissolution of Spain into three or four states," he said.

Aznar has warned of an "accelerated process of disintegration" of the Spanish nation and the "decomposition" of the State. According to him, disintegration consists of recognizing the national character of Catalonia and the Basque Country fundamentally. He has also said that no one can consider giving up the powers of border control and immigration without ceasing to be a state.

The Catalan PP contradicts Aznar

The secretary general of the Catalan PP, Santi Rodríguez, has refuted Aznar's statements, rejecting that the delegation of powers in immigration can be compared with the referendum of 1-O. "There are things that are difficult to compare, I do not want to give reasons," said the leader of the popular party. However, he did criticise the concessions of the Spanish executive to the independence movement: "It is true that what was intended on 1-O was stopped because there was a government that applied the law so that the coup d'état would not prosper, while now there is a government that is giving satisfaction to all the demands of the independence parties."

The top brass of the PP, however, supports Aznar's thesis. The current leader of the PP Alberto Núñez Feijóo stressed that the delegation of powers "is a risk to national security," during an event in Valls this Sunday. The president of the Popular Party declared that it is "an immoral way of exercising power to fragment and dismantle the borders in Spain, dividing the country and weakening the nation."

And this Monday, Feijóo has committed himself before the representatives of fifteen unions of the National Police and associations of the Civil Guard to reverse the delegation of powers in immigration to the Generalitat as soon as he arrives at Moncloa. He also promised to fight in the courts and in the European institutions a law that according to the secretary general of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, is "one more step in the disconnection of Catalonia and the rest of Spain" in exchange for "buying again the seven votes that Sánchez needs to have a little more political oxygen."

The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has stressed that Sánchez has agreed to the delegation "outside the law" with what she calls "the xenophobic Catalan right" in reference to Junts. "That nationalist right that, with a racist vision, always looked down on and treated as foreigners the people of Extremadura, Murcia, Andalusia, and La Mancha, who went to Catalonia to work," she said.