The call for early elections in Spain on July 23 has brought to an end one of the most deeply rooted traditions of Europarliamentary life, the appearance of the President on duty of the Council of the Union to present his priorities for the new semester.
The intervention of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, was scheduled for next July 13, but Moncloa requested yesterday by letter to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to postpone until September, after the elections, the act of presentation of the Spanish agenda for the EU so as not to coincide with the final stretch –and official period– of the electoral campaign. The European Parliament has confirmed that it will adapt its calendar to the needs of Spain.
Moncloa insists that it had discussed the possibility of a postponement with the European Parliament press service this Tuesday, “24 hours after the announcement of early elections”, but the initiative did not come to light until yesterday, through an unusual press release released a couple hours after it became known that the European political family of the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, was mobilizing to try to deprive Sánchez of a potential moment of brilliance in Europe and the leader of the PPE, Manfred Weber, had sent a letter to Metsola asking to delay the act.
Parliamentary sources confirmed that Moncloa established informal contacts to probe the institution about precedents for a possible postponement, but such intentions were not formally notified until yesterday. Controversies aside about who took the first step, in reality, the Government and the PPE agree that the coincidence of the speech with the electoral campaign was a bad idea. “In view of these exceptional circumstances, I ask you to consider postponing the presentation date of the Spanish presidency’s program of activities from July to September, to allow the newly elected Prime Minister to present the Council’s priorities outside of the electoral battles. nationalsâ€, defends Weber.
“I am confident that this small adjustment to our institutional calendar will reinforce the legitimacy of the process,” he argues, pointing to the risk of politicization of this exercise. Postponing the speech to present Spain’s priorities during the semester of the presidency “will strengthen our ability to act on our common priorities”, concludes the head of the PPE, a Bavarian, highly mobilized to get the PP to regain power in Spain and his group politician to regain the reins of power in at least one of the big EU countries.
The provisional agenda for the July plenary session will be decided at the meeting of the Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament made up of Metsola herself and the leaders of all the groups scheduled for June 15. According to parliamentary sources, it will not even be necessary to address the issue since, directly, Sánchez’s intervention will not appear in the draft agenda for the July session, parliamentary sources explain. “We cannot force anyone,” they say. In any case, popular European sources assure that Weber’s proposal would have gone ahead, since the liberal group had expressed its intention to abstain in the hypothetical vote.
Weber’s unusual maneuver once again illustrates the extent to which Brussels has become a kind of branch of Spanish politics, as seen for example with the controversy over Doñana, judicial independence or the Spanish recovery plan. Although there are precedents for holding national elections to coincide with the rotating presidency of the Council, none of the recent documented cases occurred just three weeks after taking the reins of the EU. Regarding the results, the only precedent for a change of head of government via elections in the middle of the semester of the European presidency dates back to Italy in 1996.
