The Popular Party (PP) reproaches the Canarian Coalition (CC) for putting the separatist flag on the agenda of the reform of the Statute of Autonomy, "to divide the Canarians with a symbol that nobody questions in the current Statute", according to the Secretary of Organization and Communication of the PP, Larry Álvarez.
The PP indicates that CC "intends to reform article 6 of the Autonomous Charter so that the flag of the seven green stars, adopted at the end of the 60s by the terrorist movement MPAIAC, becomes the symbol of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands". The conservatives consider that CC "insists on forcing a debate on flags, which the Canarians do not feel as a problem, to distinguish themselves from the fracture of nationalism and retain their electorate with a more radical language".
According to the spokesperson for the PP of the Canary Islands, "CC is aware of its electoral decline and rescues the MPAIAC flag as an attempt to gain notoriety among the forces that are emerging from the internal fracture of the nationalist coalition".
The popular express their concern about the fact that the political force that governs in the Canary Islands "irresponsibly removes the symbols and plays to divide the Canarians" with the debate on the autonomous flag.
"CC intends that a flag of division and violence be the symbol of the Canary Islands, but that debate is not a necessity for the Canarians, as it is, however, to have a strong autonomous government that stands before the boycott of the PSOE and the Government of Zapatero to this region", says the Secretary of Organization of the PP.
The PP denounces the "divisionist drift of CC, with a Government entrenched in ATI that gives carte blanche to the PSOE to continue trampling on the rights of the Canarians and promotes the lawsuit with a budgetary policy and concentration of power markedly clientelist and unbalanced". Álvarez adds that for CC, the MPAIAC flag "is another distraction of those needed so that its rupture, its weakness before the PSOE and the inevitable electoral fall towards which it is heading is not perceived". Likewise, he maintains that CC "does not hesitate to divide the Canarians with the war of flags if it believes that, with it, it has an opportunity to survive in power".
The spokesperson for the Canarian PP recalls that, on three occasions, the Popular group "has tried, without success, for the Government of Adán Martín to explain in Parliament its point of view on the initiative of CC to adopt the separatist flag as a 'national symbol', while his political group intends, instead, that the Presentation on the Statute include this issue among the articles to be reformed".
Álvarez specifies that "nobody in the Canary Islands wakes up every morning sighing for a Canarian national flag, because the Canarians already have their autonomous flag, described by Article 6 of the Statute; it has its place in the Spanish Constitution, it unfolds naturally in the official protocol and has assimilated without the imaginary of the islanders, without passions or sterile controversies". The PP affirms that the separatist flag "with which CC plays to divide the Canarians means nothing, except for the nationalist force itself, which uses it to cover up its own shame".
