The plenary session of the Senate, with an absolute majority of the PP, has deepened this Wednesday the institutional fracture in its confrontation with the Government by approving the disapproval of the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts, Félix Bolaños, whom the opposition accuses of leaking and “distorting” the draft opinion of the Venice Commission on the amnesty to favor the interests of Moncloa.
“Pedro Sánchez’s Executive is the garden of lies and Bolaños is its greatest gardener,” concluded the popular senator Antonio Silván, in charge of defending the motion of disapproval of Bolaños, also presented by some statements by the minister “in relation to the representative nature of the Senate and its functions within the bicameral system of the Cortes Generales”.
The proposals of the popular group have been refuted in the first place by Senator Carla Antonelli, from Más Madrid, who has vehemently accused the PP of torpedoing the processing of the Amnesty law sent from Congress by “twisting” the regulations of the Senate and “demote” the House to turn it into a “shadow government.”
On behalf of the confederal left group, the Navarrese senator Uxue Barkos, from Geroa Bai, has also intervened, who has considered it excessive to put to a vote disapprovals that will have no effect and that, in addition, in the case of the one directed against Bolaños, has its origin in a request of the PP itself, which was the one who requested the opinion of the Venice Commission.
Senator M. Teresa Pallarès, from Junts, also wanted to make it clear that the motion responds, in the opinion of the Catalan nationalists, to the anger of the PP over the opinion of the Venice Commission, which the independentists interpret as favorable to the thesis of the parliamentary majority of Congress that promoted the Amnesty law, which includes the seven deputies of Carles Puigdemont’s party.
For his part, Senator Josep Maria Reniu, of ERC, has lamented the “pimpampum scenario” in which, from his point of view, the PP wants to convert the Senate in this legislature: “This motion is a succession of absurdities” , the Republican has dispatched, also aligned with the tight majority of the investiture on which Pedro Sánchez relies.
Finally, the socialist senator Antonio Magdaleno has demanded that the PP recognize the “legitimacy” of the Government and that it “stop putting the Senate at its service”, and has regretted the “strategy of tension” that the popular people, in his opinion, take place in the Upper House “plenary after plenary session.” And, in this sense, he recalled that the majority popular group has promoted an “express reform” of the “clearly unconstitutional” regulation, from the point of view of the PSOE, to hinder the amnesty.
“This lack of respect from the Senate to the Congress of Deputies has never occurred,” Magdaleno exclaimed regarding the open constitutional conflict between the Upper House and the Lower House as a result of the processing of the Amnista law, a circumstance that, for the PSOE, represents “an unprecedented institutional disloyalty” caused by the PP.
At noon, at the end of the plenary debates, the vote took place: 149 senators voted in favor; 114, against, and one, the Canarian Aniceto Armas, from Agrupación Herreña Independiente, has abstained.
Without the potential to reproach the President of the Government, a mechanism stipulated in the motion of censure, but to reproach some of his words, referring to a speech in which Pedro Sánchez addressed Alberto Núñez Feijóo, during the parliamentary control on the 13th of March, to tell him that in the PSOE the leader of the PP would not have become “or town councilor”, the Senate has also approved a motion that urges the head of the Executive to “publicly retract” and “change his policy against municipalism Spanish”.
The groups that support the Government have recognized that Sánchez’s words, spoken in the heat of the parliamentary debate, were “unfortunate”, but have criticized the use of a motion in the Senate to censure them: “This Chamber is the most inappropriate place to disapprove of these things, because it is the scene of tavern expressions,” argued PNV senator Igotz López Torre, who has blamed the majority of the PP for the high degree of tension.
