The PSC's historic shift in prostitution will now reach the Generalitat
During the tripartite government, the Socialists defended granting rights to people who practice prostitution.
BarcelonaThe PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) has been championing the idea of being the party of abolitionist feminism for fourteen years. That is, a feminism that advocates abolishing prostitution. At its congresses, it has repeatedly reaffirmed that this is the way to end a practice it considers to be gender-based violence, despite currents within the feminist movement that advocate, on the contrary, regulating voluntary activity. This debate divides parties and organizations. Now the Socialists want to bring abolitionist policies to the Catalan government, which represents a historic shift: it will be the first time the Catalan institution will defend this path, since the last time the PSC led the Catalan government, during the tripartite government, it had maintained a position closer to granting rights to those who engage in prostitution.
The clearest example of that period is the draft law drafted by the Department of the Interior, headed by Montserrat Tura. Sources familiar with the drafting process of the text explain that the aim was "to treat people who engage in prostitution as such, as people." Until then, the Generalitat (Catalan government) had regulated aspects related to the size of facilities and the ventilation of brothels. The Penal Code had decriminalized the practice of prostitution in most cases in 1995, and from then until the beginning of 2000, prostitution was sought to be "controlled" in Catalonia due to the "impossibility of eradicating it," according to then-Chief Councilor Artur Mas.
The draft bill drafted by the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) sought to recognize the rights of sex workers and remove all intermediaries, in addition to limiting the activity to very specific spaces. It was based on the premise that Catalonia is sovereign in matters of civil rights and, according to drafting sources, advocated regulating a contract between individuals—in no case establishing an employment relationship—with the aim of "reducing prostitution to a minimum." According to a draft bill to which ARA has had access, the law considered "paid sexual services" only those provided "in conditions of independence, freedom, autonomy, and absence of subordination, inferiority, or vulnerability." Furthermore, remuneration for sexual services could not be conditioned on the achievement of a result.
This is a draft bill and a position on prostitution that "was not a one-night stand," the same sources explain. It had the support of the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and the signatories of the Pacte del Tinell (the pact that gave rise to the first tripartite coalition with ERC and ICV-EUiA), which envisaged "advancing the regulation of commercial sex workers" during the legislature. The text was drafted over months of work, involving discussions with multiple stakeholders and the commissioning of several expert studies, but it was not approved due to the complexity of the debate, which ultimately made a definitive agreement between the tripartite partners in this area impossible.
From Regulation to Abolition
This case is, therefore, one of the moments in which the Generalitat has come closest to regulating prostitution. During the governments of Artur Mas, the pursuit of the activity on the roads was increased, with the so-called Voral operation, but even the driving force behind these measures, the then Interior Minister Felip Puig, was in favor of regulation, and in recent years the Government's actions and statements have also aligned with the sector.
Now, however, the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) that makes up the government is far from the PSC that presided over the institution during the first decade of the century and controlled the Interior Department between 2003 and 2006. After internal debates and while already out of government, the Socialists declared their support in 2011. Since then, the party has increasingly established itself as the institutional representative of this current of feminism, and now that it has come to power, it wants to introduce this perspective into the Equality Plan.
For now, details about what this will entail are scarce. The government says it will promote awareness campaigns and work in the area of sex education, but the Department of Equality and Feminism points out that almost nothing has been finalized yet and that details will be revealed during the first quarter of 2026. However the position of the Generalitat (and also the PSC's policy in the institutions) ultimately materializes, for the first time it will defend the abolitionist path.
