Date Published: 18/01/2021
ARCHIVED - Murcian Government requests that curfew time be brought forward
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
The regional president also wants the state to put measures in place so that the regional government can apply full lockdowns where it is deemed to be necessary.
Throughout last week a topic which surfaced several times across Spain was that of the modification of the legislation (state of alarm) which permits the regional governments to apply measures in their respective regions to limit the spread of coronavirus.
At the moment, the national government has imposed some strict limits which must be complied with (ie curfews may not be implemented before 10pm in order to not restrict the liberty of citizens of Spain) but has fought shy of imposing total confinements as was the case in the spring, instead permitting the governments of the 17 regions to make most of their own decisions based on their own local situation.
Although the government has been accused of side-stepping the hard task of micro-managing the pandemic, the system has worked fairly up until now, but last week there was a growing swell of discontent as several regions were refused permission to either implement a total confinement (lockdown) or bring forward the hour of the curfew, following an “explosion” in the number of new cases since the seasonal break (last week Spain reported the highest number of cases in a single week since the pandemic began).
It all came to a head at the weekend when the Government of Castilla y León basically defied the Government and brought forward its curfew to 8pm, in spite of being told that it couldn´t.
The Government has today set in motion legal processes to bring them back under control, but the mood of rebellion is growing and several regions are requesting a revision of the state of alarm to give them the wider powers they are asking for.
Some of this is undoubtedly political, as some of these same regional presidents come from opposition parties which were calling loudest last year during the first state of alarm for the regions to be given the power to make their own decisions, and blame the national government for “mismanaging” the whole covid crisis, but that’s the same the world over and it’s what politicians do!
The regional president of Murcia, Fernando López Miras, has sent a formal letter to the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez formally requesting that the regional governments be permitted to enforce an earlier curfew and also be permitted to impose full lockdowns in specific areas , such as a specific municipality, in order to bring the virus under control.
Andalucía, which is one of the regions with the highest growth in cases, has done the same.
On Wednesday the next meeting of representatives from each of the regional health authorities, the Consejo Interterritorial de Salud, is meeting and the government has already indicated that this subject will be on the table for discussion.
Andalucía and Castilla y León are two of the most vocal regions regarding this subject, but other regions are also keen to change the current situation, amongst them the Basque Country which would like to bring its own curfew forward to 6pm.
On Monday Castilla la Mancha also brought forward its existing curfew and intensified restrictions, and the Balearic Islands confirmed that the Balearics government was also in favour of bringing forward the curfew time to 20:00.
The Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, has asked the autonomous communities to “exhaust all possible measures before requesting an extension of the state of alarm” and maintains that the regions have sufficient tools at their disposal now with which to bring the pandemic under control without adopting these harsher restrictions.