The deputy spokesman of the GPP in the Senate, José Manuel Barreiro, has defended today, in the summer course organized by the Association of Parliamentary Journalists at the Rey Juan Carlos I University, the benefits of the Spanish Autonomous State, ensuring that "it has been a engine of progress, guarantee and respect for diversity, unity and solidarity among all Spaniards. "
In the course of the conference The New Autonomic Spain. Territorial model of the 21st century, the popular senator has indicated that "the State of the Autonomies was the formula able to guarantee the plural reality of Spain, with its diversity of cultural, historical and political realities, and at the same time the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation".
Barreiro has ensured that thanks to this regional model "we have enjoyed during the last years the greatest self-government in our history, responding to challenges as great as the promotion of the constitutional consensus, the Pacts of the Moncloa, the entry into the EU or the entry into the euro". He also said that the last 40 years "will be marked in our history as those of the defense of the rights and freedoms of citizens. After four decades, "he continued," Spain is a country politically, economically and socially transformed. "
On the secessionist process of Catalonia, the popular spokesman has assured that "represents one of the most serious threats to our democracy in recent years, ignoring the Constitution, violating the rights of all Spaniards and attacking the fundamental principle of national sovereignty that it resides in the whole of the Spanish town ".
In reference to these threats, José Manuel Barreiro has said that "the PP is the only party that has a clear model of State for Spain and is the only one that fully accepts the model that we gave in 1978, while the rest of the party, has highlighted, want to transform it into a federal or confederal, remove essential figures for rural Spain, such as the Provincial Councils, or directly ending autonomy.
Finally, the popular senator has defended a series of reforms in the State of Autonomies, "to really make effective solidarity between territories." Among them has cited the reform of the financing system, "that respond to the depopulation and social aging", and strengthen the functions of the Senate, as the main forum for discussion as elements related to the territorial structure of the State.