The swimming pool that, along with two saunas and a gym, were built in the Senate for the use and enjoyment of their lordships as part of the great reform project undertaken at the end of the eighties, was never released. The controversy aroused in public opinion led to its closure without even opening. And its existence ended up being justified by serving as a “cistern against fires”. Luckily, its 112,500 liters of water capacity have never had to be used to put out any fire, but the PP could use them wonderfully to water the chamber with them and muddy the pitch as it seems to have been proposed for this recently launched XV legislature. .
Because, once the possible investiture of Pedro Sánchez as president of the Government has been paved -after taking control of Congress last Thursday with the support of the Junts and ERC deputies-, the Senate aims to be the true battlefield on which the PP will dispose of all its weapons. And they will not be few.
The incontestable victory obtained by the popular after the recount of the salmon-colored ballots of the past 23-J won Alberto Núñez Feijóo 142 seats out of a total of 266 still pending from the seven regional designations of the parliaments of Murcia, Aragón, Asturias, La Rioja and Navarra. An absolute majority that, doubling the 73 PSOE senators, will allow Genoa to reconvert the Senate into a “wall against sanchismo”.
The strategy, already announced by the PP, involves taking advantage of all the parliamentary mechanisms at its disposal to carry out an exhaustive control that hinders, as far as possible, the management of a hypothetical government headed by the PSOE.
The political importance of the Senate is relative. Certainly it does not intervene in the election of the president of the Government and it is not decisive in the elaboration of the laws. But it does have the ability to delay or slow down its processing.
That is, when a law is approved in Congress, it is sent to the Senate to be validated, modified, or vetoed. And with its absolute majority in the Senate, the PP will be able to put a Sánchez Executive in serious trouble by being able to delay the processing of its laws or, in the most extreme case, reject it.
Many of those vetoes, by virtue of the legislative power, are limited. And the government could lift them with an absolute majority of yeses in Congress. However, there is one matter in which the Senate has an irrevocable veto: budgetary stability objectives, a step prior to approving the General State Budget.
As Pablo Laín, a political scientist specializing in Parliamentary Law from the Autonomous University of Madrid, points out, “the 2012 Montoro Law on Budgetary Stability placed Congress and the Senate on an equal footing, moving us away from the model of asymmetric bicameralism that characterized us. For this reason, the absolute majority of the PP in the Senate can give many headaches to an eventual government of PSOE and Sumar. Sánchez’s first Executive, formed after the motion of no confidence, already encountered this obstacle in 2018, when the PP vetoed the budget stability objectives in the Senate.
As Laín points out, “there have been several attempts to reform the legislation to eliminate this capacity of the Upper House, but they have never prospered. Either because the initiative expired, as in the last legislature, or due to parliamentary filibustering, as in the XII Legislature, that of the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, when the PP prevented it with the support of Ciudadanos, exemplifying the importance of controlling the Board of Congress.
Leaving aside the budgets, the PP also enjoys from this week a greater quota to register questions to the Government in the control sessions in the Senate. And it will be able to propose, and execute, the disapproval of the ministers as it is a valid mechanism for both Congress and the Senate.
Feijóo’s wild cards do not end there, since he will also be able to force the calling of Conferences of Presidents. The regulation opens this option if at least ten presidents request it. And the popular add up to 11 regional presidencies at the expense of what happens in Murcia.
And there is more. The PP will also have the possibility of giving the green light to as many investigative commissions as it sees fit. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they created the first one even before the end of August,” predicts a resigned socialist baron to La Vanguardia.
It won’t be out of desire. In the recently concluded legislature, the popular ones already proposed the creation of a parliamentary investigation commission in the Upper House on alleged irregularities of the Socialist Party of the Valencian Country in the framework of the so-called Azud case for the alleged collection of commissions in exchange for favoring certain businesses real estate. The majority that had PSOE and PNV on the Senate Table diluted the request, but now the tables have turned. “Sánchez is going to be very cornered”, predict PP sources. At least in the Senate.
