The Secretary of Organization of Podemos, Pablo Fernández, has announced that his party will demand the appearance in the Congress of Deputies of the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, following the "violent" and "racist" arrest of former regional deputy Serigne Mbaye.
"We announce that we are going to register a request for appearance in Congress of Minister Marlaska, a minister whom we have been saying for a long time should have been dismissed or resigned," Fernández stated this Monday in a press conference held in Madrid.
The leader of Podemos has spoken out like this after last Thursday the former parliamentarian of the Madrid Assembly was arrested in the Madrid district of Usera-Villaverde along with six other people, after a confrontation with agents of the National Police. In the early hours of Friday he was released and, upon leaving the Usera Police Station, he denounced "pure and hard racism" and a persecution "against racialized people".
Given these facts, the Secretary of Organization of Podemos has stressed that "a Government that calls itself progressive cannot continue tolerating and covering up the existence of this type of racist practices in the State Security Forces and Corps that are under its command".
These statements are framed in the same vein as what he already expressed last Friday, when he announced that Podemos will register in the Lower House a battery of questions to clarify the circumstances of Mbaye's detention, in addition to a non-legislative motion (PNL) to demand from Marlaska —whom he points to as the main person responsible for what happened— a "truly independent" investigation with the aim of "clearing up the relevant responsibilities".
In this context, he has conveyed his "solidarity" and "support" to the former regional deputy: "Serín, like many other migrant and socialized people, has been suffering for years these violent and racist practices by certain members of the State Security Forces and Corps, something he has denounced on repeated occasions."
"The persecution against them by some members of the State Security Forces and Corps is evident and notorious (...) Racist raids, ethnic profiling identifications are a habitual and recurrent practice that happens daily in the streets of our country. In Spain there is an evident problem of institutional racism and this is one of its main expressions," he concluded.