The motion of no confidence presented by Vox against the coalition government will be debated next week, on Tuesday the 21st and Wednesday the 22nd, and will be the most atypical of those that have been registered in the Congress of Deputies. Not only because the candidate for the presidency, Ramón Tamames, does not belong to the proposing party, but also because it is possible that he will not even go up to the congressional rostrum to defend his candidacy.
The president of the Congress, Meritxell Batet, explained it yesterday after publicly announcing the date of the debate. The Congress will be flexible regarding the location of the speaker, given his advanced age (89 years) and the marked unevenness of the stairs that allow access to the rostrum.
At the moment there is also no official schedule for the plenary session, which Batet will communicate this Tuesday to the Board of Spokespersons, although he has specified that the sessions will occupy the entire day of Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
The leader of the party that registered the motion, Santiago Abascal, and the candidate for the presidency, Tamames, will intervene in the debate on the motion, who must explain his government program before the camera. The peculiarity of the initiative is that the ex-communist himself has already advanced that his positions do not coincide with those of the party that proposes him as Prime Minister in many of the main ideas of the far-right formation.
But the singularities of those days could not end there, since the groups of the majority of investiture are considering how to use their turns so as not to give more prominence to the far-right initiative. Among the possibilities that they were considering these days, was included that of not giving a reply to the candidate proposed by Vox, which could significantly shorten the marathon session, in which the candidate has no time limit to present his program.
In fact, the regulations of the Congress establish that neither the leader of the party that promotes the motion in his first intervention, nor the candidate for the presidency when he presents his program, nor the president of the Government, when he gives a reply, have a time limit to their intervention, with which the duration of the sessions is open. In this sense, the decision made by the different groups in the use of their replica turns will be decisive for the duration of the session.
After the recess dictated by the presidency of the chamber, once the proponent and the applicant have intervened, the parliamentary groups will each have thirty minutes to speak, as well as the right to a reply of at least ten minutes, as established in article 177.2 of the regulations of the Congress.
In the motions of no confidence held so far in Congress, only one of which was approved (the one that made Pedro Sánchez president in 2018), all the groups made use of the time available – with the notable exception of the PNV spokesman, Aitor Esteban, in the previous motion presented by Vox, with Santiago Abascal as a candidate, in which he did not spend even two minutes in the rostrum -, hence they lasted for two long sessions that tested the resistance of the candidates.
In any case, the possible difficulties of accessibility to the chamber, which were already revealed with the incorporation of Pablo Echenique into the chamber as co-spokesperson for Podemos, have come to the fore again with the motion that intends to make the octogenarian Tamames president. The problems detected already then and which made a reform to be ruled out, did not respond only to the cost but to the difficulties to combine accessibility and respect for an area protected by heritage.
