The demonstration of police officers and civil guards called this Saturday by the platform Police Salary Justice (Jusapol, the platform of agents that emerged in 2018 to demand salary equalization with the mossos d’Esquadra) to protest against the policies of the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has gathered 4,500 demonstrators in the center of Madrid, according to data from the Government Delegation. This is a figure far from the 20,000 people who participated in the protest held on November 21, 2021, in the same setting to oppose the reform of the citizen security law, known as the gag law. Even the number of participants provided by the organizers, who spoke at the end of the event of “more than 15,000” and described this figure as a “resounding success,” falls far short of the number they gave in that massive protest more than five years ago, when they claimed to have gathered 150,000 demonstrators. The decline in the number of participants has been, in fact, a constant over these years in a group that approaches 160,000 agents.
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The flop of this latest call has also been felt in the political support for it. Although there have been officials from PP and Vox, the two parties that usually support police protests, on this occasion the number and public relevance of their representatives has been much lower. Thus, if in the 2021 demonstration Pablo Casado, then leader of the Popular Party, Santiago Abascal (Vox), and Inés Arrimadas, then head of a Citizens party that still had parliamentary representation, participated, this Saturday for the PP the deputy Pedro Muñoz Abrines, spokesperson of the Constitutional Commission in Congress, attended, and for the far-right party, the national spokesperson for Security and Immigration, the police officer Samuel Vázquez ―recently convicted of an electoral crime―, and the councilor in the Pozuelo City Council (Madrid) Ainhoa García Flórez.
Furthermore, on this occasion the demonstration also did not have the support of other police unions and civil guard associations, as it did in 2021. These organizations have mostly chosen to join another platform that, while generally sharing Jusapol’s demands, disagrees with the forms and strategies. Therefore, they have refused to join this Saturday’s protest and have called another one for May that will have a very different character: they intend to attend en masse and in uniform (but without weapons, so as not to violate the law) a mass at the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid.
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The demonstration started from Puerta del Sol and, after covering part of Alcalá Street and Paseo de Recoletos, ended two hours later near the Congress of Deputies. It was led by a banner that read “Risk profession, now,” one of the three demands that both Jusapol and the two organizations that emerged from it and participated, the Police Justice union (Jupol) and the professional association Civil Guard Justice (Jucil), have put forward to call the protest, which had the support of the Independent Trade Union and Civil Servants (CSIF) and the Spanish Troop and Navy Association (ATME). Behind, other banners displayed the other two major demands: salary equalization with the autonomous police forces and better retirement conditions.
Both in the manifesto read at the end of the protest and in the statements to the press by the leaders of the organizing organizations and the slogans chanted by the participants in the protest, there was insistence on blaming the Government and the Minister of the Interior for turning a deaf ear to these three demands over the last eight years. “Enough of mocking us. If they want war, they will have it,” proclaimed Aaron Rivero, secretary general of Jupol, who assured that police officers and civil guards earn “between 20 and 30% less” than their counterparts in the autonomous forces. “This government hides,” criticized Miguel Gómez, from Jusapol.
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