The new president of Congress has taken office for the first time announcing that she will allow the use of Catalan, Galician and Basque in the Lower House, one of the conditions that pro-independence formations such as ERC and Junts had set to support her election.
His first words as third authority of the State had already been to thank their lordships using these three co-official languages and, after the ceremony of compliance with the Constitution, he has clearly made his commitment explicit by announcing that he will allow their use from the same constitutive session.
“With respect, all ideas fit and can be defended, accepting without qualms the plurality of thoughts and identities that coexist in our country enriches us”, he defended, stressing that the Chamber is “obliged” to “reflect this plurality” in order to “get closer to much more like the real Spain”, which is “diverse” and “full of colors and charged with nuances”.
“To advance on this path, I want to express my commitment to Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician, and the linguistic richness that they represent”, he asserted before encouraging all his lordships to “defend parliamentary democracy” and ” preserve and respect the diversity” that coexists in the country and that the ballot boxes “have brought” to the Lower House.
Today at 10:00 a.m. the constitutive session of Congress began to decide the nine positions on the Board of the Chamber, including the Presidency, for which Gamarra (PP) and the Balearic socialist Francina Armengol were competing.
Who holds the Presidency determines who controls the Board of the Chamber, the organization’s management body, and also gives the first clues for the negotiations for the XV Legislature
After confirming Junts and ERC their support for the candidacy of the PSOE and Sumar, Armengol has been elected president of Congress after winning by an absolute majority in the first vote with 178 ballots, while Cuca Gamarra has remained at 139 votes (although due to an error she already corrected Cristina Narbona has “sang” 139) and the Vox candidate has been supported by the 33 deputies from her group. The PP and Vox have acted separately due to lack of agreement, dividing their votes between Cuca Gamarra and Ignacio Gil Lázaro.
Although the vote is secret, by means of a ballot deposited in a ballot box, the pronouncements of the different parties in recent days suggest that Armengol has received the support of 178 votes (121 from PSOE, 31 from Sumar, seven from ERC, six from Bildu, five from the PNV, one from the BNG and the seven from Junts).
The two blocks of left and right arrived at the voting tied and pending the vote of the only deputy of the Canary Coalition and above all of the seven deputies of Junts. After keeping the unknown until the last moment, the party led by Puigdemont has advanced in a meeting called shortly before the session begins in the Lower House that they already have a principle of agreement with the PSOE to “facilitate” Armengol to be president of Congress, as communicated by the general secretary of JxCat, Jordi Turull, to the members of the party executive and Junts sources have been transferred to the media in the corridors of Congress. With this the door is closed to the candidate of the PP, Cuca Gamarra.
The negotiation with the party of Carles Puigdemont has been commanded within the maximum discretion by representatives of the PSOE and Sumar, who already advanced yesterday that the talks were fluid although yesterday Puigdemont was still asking for verifiable facts and not promises to give his support to the candidacy leftist.
Also ERC, which until yesterday asked not to take their votes for granted, has confirmed this morning that an agreement with PSOE and Sumar for the Congress Table. The ERC spokesman in Congress, Gabriel Rufián, has assured that he supports Armengol because they are guaranteed three conditions: the use of Catalan and the rest of the co-official languages in plenary sessions, investigating the Pegasus case, spying on pro-independence politicians while he governed the PSOE, and continue advancing to “dejudicialize” the “political conflict” derived from the illegal referendum of October 2017.
ERC warns that the agreement to preside over Mea “has nothing to do with the investiture” Rufián has warned, however, that this agreement “has nothing to do with the investiture”. “It is an announcement in agreement with the Board, nothing that has to do with the investiture”, since that is “another process, another negotiation and another agreement”, he said at a press conference. “The ERC vote sweats”, and he recalls that his political formation “will always take advantage of any opportunity to try to move forward.” In addition, he indicated that, despite the fact that the night “has been quite long”, they believe that the investiture negotiation will be “much more complicated”.
Once the Congress and the Senate have been constituted, the Boards of each Chamber meet to formalize the creation of the parliamentary groups that must be ready in the following five days. To have your own group, you must have at least 15 seats or add five deputies and obtain 5% of the votes throughout the country, or 15% in all the constituencies in which you compete, something for which the PSOE it won’t cause a problem.
Neither ERC nor Junts meet these requirements, since they only exceed 15% in two of the four Catalan constituencies, so it is in their interest that the majority of the Congressional Committee falls on PSOE and Sumar to ensure a parliamentary group in the Mixed Group.
The constitutive session of Congress has begun with the designation of the Age Table that will direct the voting. The presidency is assigned to the oldest deputy, who in this case is the former socialist minister Cristina Narbona, accompanied by two secretaries, the two youngest parliamentarians, also from the PSOE: Ada Santana from the Canary Islands and Ferran Verdejo from Catalonia.
After reading the names of the 350 elected deputies, the election of the Presidency of Congress was carried out by secret ballot and ballot box: the person who obtains the absolute majority vote in the first round is elected or the vote is repeated and A simple majority is enough (more yeses than noes), something that has not been necessary on this occasion.
Following the Presidency, the four vice-presidents have been appointed: two have been for the PP, one for the PSOE and one for Sumar. The Andalusian socialist Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis (113 votes) repeats another legislature and the second mayo has been for the PP deputy for Salamanca José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro (73 votes). However, atypically, the third and fourth vice presidencies have been tied with 65 votes, so the vote has had to be repeated to choose between the ‘popular’ deputy Marta González and the Sumar deputy Esther Gil, leaving the latter in third place and González in fourth place.
Vox, who had asked the PP for support to revalidate his Vice Presidency from the last legislature, has been left out and its candidate, Ignacio Gil Lázaro, has only garnered the 33 ballots of his group.
Afterwards, the four Secretariats of the Board have been elected and once these votes have concluded, the deputies take the oath or promise to abide by the Constitution, a process that has not been exempt from controversy in recent years due to the formulas used above all by the Catalan separatists and which the Constitutional Court settled the issue in a recent ruling in which it stressed that these tags did not neutralize the compliance with the Constitution that is required to take office.
The session concludes with the words of the new president of Congress and then they go to the Palacio de la Zarzuela to inform the King of the results of the voting, a step prior to the round of consultations with the Head of State for the investiture.
In the Senate, the session, as in the Congress, began at 10:00 a.m. and with the usual agenda for constitutive sessions: opening, organization of an old table, voting to elect the new Table and taking possession of the senators.
The popular Pedro Rollán has been elected president of the Upper House with 142 votes in favour, well above the 130 needed for an absolute majority in the Upper House, while 114 senators have voted blank, including 88 from the PSOE.
The 142 votes obtained by the PP represent 12 votes more than the absolute majority set at 130 given that there are only 259 accredited senators out of the 266 that make up the Upper House, since seven autonomous regions of Murcia, Aragon, Asturias, La Rioja and Navarra after the regional elections of 28M. These autonomous communities have not yet appointed their senators, so the six parliamentarians were not in this constitutive session and that is why the absolute majority required for the Presidency of the Senate has dropped to 130 senators. Control of the Senate can condition the processing of laws that come from Congress, being able to delay, modify and even veto them.
The until now spokesman for the PP in the Senate, Javier Maroto, and the former president of Extremadura and socialist leader, Guillermo Fernández Vara, have been elected first vice president and second vice president: the first with 142 votes in favor and Fernández Vara, with 98. In As for the secretariats of the Table, they fell to Eva Ortiz and Marimar Blanco, on behalf of the PP, and the remaining two to the socialists María Ángeles Luna and Francisco Manuel Fajardo.
