Francina Armengol (Inca, 1971), since yesterday president of the Congress of Deputies and third authority of the State, will meet this morning with the King to inform him that the Courts have already been constituted and that he can give way to the consultations prior to a possible investiture. The former Balearic president obtained the vote of 178 deputies, which earned her election in the first ballot. That Pedro Sánchez proposed his name as a candidate to preside over the chamber was ultimately irrelevant for the left to control the Bureau and for Junts and ERC to vote in favor, because it is political factors of a different nature that have allowed the agreement
However, the fact that it is precisely she who is at the head of Congress may not be an unimportant detail if there is finally a legislature. Armengol comes from the periphery and has fully internalized the plural Spain that was the project of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Yesterday he demonstrated this with a speech focused on vindicating the plurality and territorial diversity that some of his party colleagues find it difficult to understand. She has always had a peripheral view, like the Valencian Ximo Puig, with whom she forged strategic alliances when they were both presidents of their respective communities. She has also maintained good relations with Catalan sovereignty, which earned her the fact that some of the socialist barons said she was an independenceist.
Faced with the centripetal force of Madrid, Armengol claims the specific weight and autonomy of the rest of the territories. This is how her first decision as president is explained: the announcement that from now on Catalan, Galician and Basque can be used in plenary sessions, a risky and brave choice that none of her predecessors ‘had dared to adopt. This strength of character has accompanied her since she was young and is one of the factors that allowed her to become president of the Balearic Islands in 2015, precisely when the PSOE got the worst results in its history in regional elections.
Podemos, an emerging force at the time, almost came to demand that Armengol step aside and make way for the Més candidate to close a pact, but she remained firm and won the Balearic presidency, a position she has held for two legislatures. Because another of the characteristics of the new president of Congress is her ability to close agreements and reach pacts no matter how complicated they may seem, a fact that can be useful to her if the investiture and the legislature are finally on track.
The first decisions he made at the head of the government carried his DNA and anticipated what he announced in Congress yesterday: he repealed the Law of Symbols, approved by José Ramón Bauzá to prevent the installation of ribbons and Catalan flags in buildings public; he left without effect the educational law of his predecessor, which implemented trilingualism and cornered Catalan; he returned to the civil service the obligation to know Catalan to access the administration, which had remained a simple merit; approved the first Fosse de les Balearic Islands law, and returned universal healthcare to immigrants, among other measures.
It was up to Armengol to manage the pandemic and build an autonomous community with an economy that collapsed completely as a result of zero tourism for almost two years, but managed to recover and reached the elections on May 28 with the growth figure highest of all the autonomous regions and negligible unemployment data. The Balearic PSOE aspired to reissue the left-wing pact, but the victory of Marga Prohens (PP) and the collapse of Podem got in the way. The Balearic Socialists were shocked, because they did not expect such a massive institutional defeat, and it was then that the former president decided to head the list of the Balearic Islands in Congress.
In fact, it was Pedro Sánchez who asked her to be the candidate in these early elections. Until then he had never shown the will to leave the Balearic comfort zone, but he accepted the request of the general secretary of his party because another of Armengol’s characteristics is that he is a loyal person to Sánchez. He has been with him from the very beginning, from the fateful federal committee that marked the downfall of the leader, with ephemeral support for Patxi López when it seemed that Sánchez would not win. She was one of the strongest defenders of “no is no” and the deputies from the Balearic Islands in Congress were among the few socialists who voted against Mariano Rajoy in that session. She has been a loyal contributor and now receives the Sánchez Loyalty Award.
As of yesterday, he is the second Majorcan political figure to hold the presidency of Congress. In her first speech as president, she recalled her predecessor, Félix Pons, a transitional socialist with whom she might now have little in common.
