As a new front opens between the PP and Vox in Extremadura, the people of Murcia can say that they have accomplished the last of the capitulations that kept them linked to that of Abascal. At least this year. The Popular Parliamentary Group of the Region of Murcia has presented a bill to amend Law 3/2020 of July 27 on the recovery and protection of the Mar Menor.
According to the document to which this newspaper had access, the sanctions regime will be extracted from the regulations relating to nitrate pollution to appear in the future action program for the vulnerable area of Campo de Cartagena: “Once the new action program is prepared and comes into force, nothing will prevent, through the appropriate legislative modification, from resizing the agricultural and pastoral content of the law, and its sanction regime can be integrated with that provided for in the protection of waters against pollution by nitrates of origin agricultural”, writes the popular. defended in their proposal.
In other words, if this modification comes to fruition, the regime of sanctions against breeders and farmers will be “unique” in the entire region of Murcia. Pending approval of the action program, farmers and breeders will be subject to a state-based sanctions regime, provided for in Article 27 of Law 30/2022, of December 23, which regulates the management system of the Common Agricultural Policy and other related matters, in matters of sustainable nutrition of agricultural soils.
The reform of the Mar Menor law was the last of the demands that Vox imposed on the popular parties for the signing of the 2025 regional budgets, signed in June this year. This point is addressed late, since the budget agreement provided that “the procedure for review and reform” of the Mar Menor law be initiated “before October 2025”.
“It is not a question of authorizing something that is not authorized, but of establishing the same amount of sanctions as in the rest of Spain. It makes no sense that they are different here when there is a state rule that regulates them. It is as if for a traffic violation we pay more in the Region of Murcia than in the rest of the autonomous communities”, defends the Popular Parliamentary Group.
The reduction of sanctions against farmers is a recurring demand of Vox towards the Popular Party, before those of Abascal broke the governance agreement and left the government of the Region of Murcia due to the distribution of unaccompanied minors in July 2024. Three months earlier, the leader of Vox in the Region of Murcia, José Ángel Antelo, had put on the table the elimination of certain sanctions considered serious in the current regulations, as does that an agricultural holding is not registered in the Community register. Autonomous or does not have an agro-environmental operator; in addition to a 50% reduction in the economic amount of certain agricultural sanctions.
Now, the People’s Party’s modification does not imply reductions in sanctions for the agricultural and livestock sector, but it modifies article 83.4 regarding the possibility for sanctioned companies to receive public subsidies. In its original version, the regulation states that the commission of serious or very serious offenses “will result in” the loss of the right to obtain any type of aid or subsidy from the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia for a period of two years. It is now proposed to qualify this article, so that the commission of serious offenses “may lead” to the loss of aid. In other words, a sanctioning point of the law that was a certainty simply becomes a possibility.
In the proposal, the popular people justify this modification by the fact that the current law of the Mar Menor “limits the power of the instructor of sanction procedures” when deciding on the imposition of accessory sanctions. That’s why they add this transitive verb, giving the instructor back the power to choose whether or not to deprive the offender of access to public assistance, in the same manner as state regulations provide.
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