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article_detail
Date Published: 18/05/2020
ARCHIVED - On Wednesday the Prime Minister will ask for a month-long extension of the state of emergency
The PM will begin a gradual process to return power to the autonomous regions and suggests lifting the state of emergency either partially or fully at a regional level as required
On Wednesday Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will request a 30-day extension of the state of emergency from the Congress of Deputies (parliament), sufficient time he believes for all of the autonomous communities of Spain to complete the de-escalation process and enter a “new normality” in time for the summer holidays.
The Prime Minister is attempting to sell his plans to opposition politicians by offering a scaled-down version of the state of emergency, allowing for example, the autonomous communities "to recover their full decision-making capacity" as the process progresses, a move which could help him to secure the votes of parties such as the PNV or the ERC, both of which have been pressuring the government to return decision-making powers to the regional governments.
The state of emergency does give the central government significant powers, particularly the departments of defence, the interior Ministry and transport, taking control of all police forces and the armed forces, including those normally managed at local council level, as well as powers for example to take over private clinics and private medical facilities for the use of the health service. An example of this was the decision to take over privately owned laboratories in order to ramp up Covid testing at the height of the crisis and the enforced seizure of medical supplies from privately owned facilities at the beginning of the crisis in Madrid.
The PM views the situation now as being very different from that required when the state of emergency was first declared and sees the need to now make some structural changes: "We have to adapt our institutional architecture to this new stage, " and no longer considers it necessary for the ministries of Defense, Interior and Transport to maintain extraordinary powers. However, he believes that the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, should continue to have sole command of the health service in order to co-ordinate the process of returning to normality.
He is also proposing that the regions currently left in phase zero (the Community of Madrid, the Barcelona metropolitan area and the provincial capitals of Castilla y León) could reach the “new normal” a couple of weeks after the rest of the country and if possible, the state of alarm could be lifted either fully or partially in some regions of the country earlier “if the evolution of the crisis is favourable”.
On Saturday the number of deaths in Spain fell to 102 deaths and 539 new cases, and on Sunday to just 87, the lowest figure for two months since the 16th March.
On Sunday there were just 421 new cases. This brings the total number of deaths to 27.650 since the pandemic began.
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