The Popular Party has asserted its superiority in the Senate by making official the election of the PP Deputy Secretary for Regional and Local Coordination, Pedro Rollán, as the new president of the Upper House, replacing the socialist Ander Gil.
The absolute majority achieved on 23-J allows the popular to have 143 seats -120 elected senators plus 23 parliamentarians by autonomous designation-, which, after the respective votes, has translated into total control of the Board, armoring the Senate as a counterweight to a possible progressive government chaired by Pedro Sánchez still pending open negotiations in the Congress of Deputies.
The strength of the PP in the Senate will allow it to give the green light to investigative commissions, at the same time that it will have the power to delay the terms of legislative initiatives emanating from Congress or, even, veto the spending ceiling that the hypothetical government presided over by the PSOE could process
The wild cards of the PP do not end there, since it will 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.
In addition, it will have more room to register questions to the Government in control sessions, while it will be able to fail Sánchez’s ministers with their absolute majority, a parliamentary mechanism that opposition groups use above all in Congress.
“Sánchez is going to be very cornered,” predict PP sources. Something that from the socialist bench admits predicting initiatives that “hinder” the functioning of the Executive from the first moment.
Given the manifest superiority of the PP in the Senate, the PSOE has not even presented its own candidate to preside over the Chamber and the Socialist senators have chosen to vote blank. While those of Vox have proposed Ángel Pelayo Gordillo Moreno.
Thus, after the recount, Rollán has been elected president of the Senate with 142 votes in favor, 114 blank and 3 for Gordillo. It must be borne in mind that in the constitutive session this Thursday, the Senate has 259 of the 266 senators, since seven parliamentarians from the autonomous Assemblies of Murcia, Aragon, Asturias, La Rioja and Navarra have yet to be appointed. This has caused the numbers for these votes to be lowered, placing the absolute majority at 130 seats.
The decision of the PSOE not to cede any position, something that has not materialized until moments before the start of the plenary session, depending on what was happening in parallel in Congress, translates into a Vice-Presidency (Guillermo Fernández-Vara) and two Secretaries of the Congress Table -María Ángeles Luna and Francisco Manuel Fajardo- for the Socialists against the four posts -Presidency, a Vice-Presidency -Javier Maroto- and two Secretaries (Eva Ortiz and María del Mar Blanco)- for the PP.
