The early call for general elections in Spain on July 23 announced yesterday by the president of the central government, Pedro Sánchez, was met with great surprise in the diplomatic media in Brussels. “Uncertainty”, “shock” and “disaster” for the Spanish presidency of the Union are some of the comments with which various sources have reacted to the news, which implies that Spain will go to the polls just three weeks after assuming the its European semester turn.
“It is a very bold move”, said European diplomatic sources without hiding their surprise. A clear “change in priorities”, they point out from a European institution, where it is regretted that the Spanish presidency, which will last from July 1 to December 31, has clearly taken a back seat and has remained “in the “air”. “The teams will work the same, but the push will not be the same”, add community sources.
Although since the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, which created a President of the European Council and better defined the functions of the High Representative for Foreign Policy, the rotating presidencies have fewer responsibilities than in in the past, governments continue to take on key roles such as setting the agenda for energy, justice and interior ministerial councils, for example.
There are some precedents of countries that have gone to the polls in the middle of the presidency, but only one case in the recent history of the Union in which the elections ended with a change at the head of the government. France held presidential elections in 2022, coinciding with its turn as the European presidency, a call from which Emmanuel Macron emerged very weakened; the date of the meeting with the ballot boxes was determined by law. Also Poland in 2011. A couple of years earlier the resignation of the Czech Prime Minister, Mirek Topolanek, after a motion of no confidence, led to the appointment of an independent, Jan Fischer, in the middle of the Czech presidency but without an election in the middle
In none of these cases did the government in question lose the elections, as it did happen previously, on the other hand, in Italy. In January 1996, he began his turn as European president with a technocrat, Lamberto Dini, as prime minister. Towards the middle of the term of the presidency he lost the support of Silvio Berlusconi and called elections for April, in which Romano Prodi emerged victorious, so that the Union had two presidents of the Council in six months .
At the European level, it is the same Council that decides, within ten years, the list of countries that will assume the presidency for periods of six months. It last did so in 2009, with a timetable that ran until 2020, but was exceptionally revised in 2016 in the wake of Brexit, when the United Kingdom relinquished its turn in the presidency, which fell to it in the second part of the 2017. Then, the order of the presidencies was simply advanced six months.
This was how, in retrospect, the turn of Paris was brought forward, although the debate about the coincidence with the presidential elections did not arise until five years later, in 2022, when the head of Els Republicans, the main opposition party, Éric Ciotti, reproached Macron for not following the “example” of Berlin and postponing the French presidency of the EU to “not interfere with the national electoral calendar”.
Indeed, in 2002 Berlin asked for a postponement of its European Semester turn to avoid the coincidence, but it was not a hasty decision but a well-planned one. The situation was not supposed to take place, a priori, until 2006, and four years earlier Germany agreed with Finland that the Nordic country would take the reins six months earlier. So Germany took over in 2007.
In the case of Spain, the Popular Party had been protesting the electoral coincidence for a long time, fearing that Sánchez, who is adept at big international meetings, would use the European semester as an electoral showcase. Simply in the month of July, Sánchez will receive the college of European commissioners in Madrid to inaugurate the presidency. On the 11th and 12th he will participate in the NATO summit in Vilnius. On Thursday the 13th he will give the traditional opening speech of the European semester in Strasbourg. And on July 17 and 18, five days before the polls, he will participate in the EU summit with Latin America, an event in which Spain is expected to have a prominent participation. The possibility of a change to the European calendar was never seriously considered and, with the electoral advance announced yesterday, the fifth turn of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the Union has been devalued even before its program was made public of work
