\ The President has called for responsibility to comply with the Constitution when it comes to renewing the institutions.

\ Armengol also defended the Constitution as a tool for the future, which still has a long way to go.

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The President of the Government of the Balearic Islands, Francina Armengol, took part in the event commemorating the 44th anniversary of the Spanish Constitution, in which students from the Professional Conservatory of Music and Dance of Mallorca read a selection of articles from the Magna Carta and performed several musical pieces.

During her speech, Armengol stressed that “it is our obligation to honour the consensus of 1978 and to renew it with loyalty and responsibility”, so that “it is a question of not just remaining in a patriotism of symbols that the Constitution also reflects and that we recommit ourselves to the patriotism of the rights and freedoms that our Magna Carta promotes”, which means “always defending and respecting the will of the people’s vote and strengthening and renewing the institutions when it is time”.

“The Constitution tells us to disagree, to debate and, in the end, to always agree to serve the citizens, and only the citizens”, the President remarked, assuring that “this is the patriotism of the rights and freedoms that have made us strong for 44 years”.

Armengol defended the Constitution as a text that is “full of modernity and current affairs, which still has a long life and a long way to go”, which is why “we must give it projection with the renewal of the original consensus and with the reform of everything that can be improved from the perspective that decades of application and analysis of our framework of coexistence and progress provide”.

In this way, the President highlighted how the Constitution has allowed for improvements in employment, “with a new labour framework that has allowed decades of precariousness and instability to begin to be left behind with full employment in our islands”, with the recognition of insularity, “which in recent years has been developed as never before” through the Special Regime and the new tax system, but also in the form of specific funds for the environment, direct aid for companies that suffered so much during the pandemic, or in the form of a new framework of agricultural support for the peasantry.

For Armengol, the Magna Carta is a boost for further progress in housing, with specific responses in territories with such limited and conditioned geography as our islands, with greater determination to protect the environment and adapt to climate change, and with equality as an inalienable objective, which means “guaranteeing all rights to women and to generate new ones for all people, regardless of how they feel, where they are from and who they want”.

However, the President of the Government warned that “there are breaches of the Constitution that we as a society cannot afford”, referring to the separation of powers and the renewal of institutions as the clearest example. “The partisan blocking of the renewal of institutions is a mistake that contributes to their delegitimisation. It weakens us all and impoverishes our society of rights”, said Armengol.

For this reason, she took the opportunity to “call on all political forces to take responsibility and to move forward as the modern and sensible people that we are, the same people who have progressed in democracy as never before”.

Armengol also referred to the need to maintain the democratic consensus and the laws that are allowing us to reconcile with our past and close the wounds opened by the dictatorship. “Thanks to this, today we have recovered the memory of some of the victims, starting with Aurora Picornell, a symbol of the pain suffered and ethical memory, and an example of how the end of democracies assassinates the freedom of all”.

However, the President also spoke of the Constitution as a tool for the future with which “we must dream again, look to the horizon and dream again together to agree on a better future”. As an example of the future that the Magna Carta can guarantee, Armengol cited the social shield designed to support 80% of the families suffering the economic consequences of Putin’s war, safeguarding the purchasing power of workers and citizens and promoting historic increases in pensions because they are necessary and because they are fair to the generation that paved the way for us with the Constitution and with the construction of our welfare state”.

He has also outlined the future of these islands with the biggest strategy of transformative investments in our history, with the budgets for 2023 that will be approved this month, with the European and state resources that the islands will receive, with better health, education and social services, with more training policies, more access to housing, and with a more sustainable future for the islands.