The Government alleges that Sánchez was referring to the ship and not to the police in Catalonia when he spoke of tweets and the unions charge against him

“You sent string to Catalonia and with us the Spanish soccer team can play in Catalonia without any problem”. This response to the PP of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, this morning in the rostrum of Congress he has raised criticism from the opposition and has stirred up the police unions, who have felt alluded to. Several ministers have come out afterwards to clarify that the chief executive was not referring to the agents but to the boat with a drawing of Tweety in which policemen were housed during the 1-0 device.

The departure of the last 'Tweety ship' puts an end to more than 100 days of police deployment in Catalonia

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Sánchez had used that argument in a parliamentary response to the spokesperson for the popular group in the Lower House, Cuca Gamarra, during the control session of the Government this Wednesday to compare the management of the crisis in Catalonia between his Government and that of the PP during the mandate of Mariano Rajoy. Gamarra had asked her what "concessions" she intended to make to the independence movement.

After Sánchez's words, deputies from the PP, Vox and Ciudadanos have taken advantage of other questions to different ministers of the Executive to reproach the mention of the 'piolines'. The PP spokeswoman for the Interior, Ana Belén Vázquez, has asked the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, to disavow the President of the Government for using that word to refer to agents, she said, who are harassed in Catalonia. “You win votes because your partners support you, and they will continue like this as long as you find servers to dismiss or insult, as Pedro Sánchez has done today. Wash your mouth before speaking like this to the police officers who defended us in 2017”, the leader of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, has also criticized.

Later came the reaction of some police unions, such as Jupol, which on social networks has described Sánchez as a scoundrel. "Mr. Sánchez, we will tell you in the most polite way that we believe, you are a scoundrel”, the organization has written in a tweet in which it has censored the use of the word “tweets” to refer to the members of that security body. "The continued lack of respect shown by this Government towards the State Security Forces and Bodies, and specifically towards the National Police, is inconceivable", the general secretary of that union, Aarón Rivero, later transferred.

Mr. Sánchez, we will tell you in the most polite way that we believe, YOU ARE A SCREEN.

You can NOT refer to the guarantors of the rule of law and the Constitution as "Piolines" in the #ControlSession.

For this is the #PoliceInCollectiveConflict.#EquiparacionYa pic.twitter.com/YqnjbdG9Os

— JUPOL (@JupolNational) May 18, 2022

"What the President of the Government has said is that you brought our Police and our Civil Guard to Catalonia in unworthy conditions," Grande-Marlaska responded from Congress to Vázquez's reproaches, recalling that, during the police operation of the 1-0, thousands of police and civil guards who spent the night on boats, waiting for orders from their superiors. The use of ships at that time received strong internal criticism among the security forces for the conditions in which the agents had to livein addition to the fact that those boats sported a drawing of Tweety Bird and other children's characters on the side.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, José Manuel Albares, has also come out in defense of the Chief Executive and has accused the PP of "fueling the controversy". "You are trying to feed a controversy about the words of the President of the Government here and the word tweety", he has maintained during his response to a question from the PP deputy Valentina Martínez in plenary.

“It is very evident, do not deceive the people, the president has spoken about the ship”, he has maintained, to remember that what happened at that time, when Rajoy governed, was the transfer of policemen in unworthy conditions. “You speak of the shame of the president's words. Shame on the conditions in which you sent the police on that ship”, defended the Foreign Minister.