EIt's just a word, but for Spain it's a small political revolution. The fight for constitutional change lasted more than twenty years. Instead of “minus validos”, Article 49 now refers to “people with disabilities”. For many, the term from 1978 sounded discriminatory and too much like an invalid; It can be translated literally as: “those who are worth less”. Even the venerable Royal Academy (RAE) deleted the word in 2020 and replaced it with “discapacitado”. But it's not just foreign tourists who notice that the old term is still on the signs in many disabled parking spaces.
Given the political rifts that have deepened between the left and the right over the years, even changing a single word in the constitution seemed impossible. The hurdles to interfering with the Basic Law are high: a three-fifths majority is required in both houses of parliament.
The People's Party and right-wing populists rejected reform for years
The change therefore requires the consent of the two main parties, the ruling Socialists (PSOE) and the opposition conservative People's Party (PP), which have never formed a grand coalition in the history of Spanish democracy. The political sensation was all the greater when the PP and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's Socialists jointly introduced the draft for the new word in parliament on Tuesday. Shortly after Sánchez came to government in 2018, his three left-wing minority governments tried to initiate the correction that disability associations have been calling for for decades.
In December, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo only wanted to agree if Sánchez promised in return that there would be no new independence referendum in Catalonia. Previously, the PP and the right-wing populist Vox party had resisted changing “even a single comma” in the constitution for years. In doing so, they wanted to signal to the Catalan separatists that they cannot hope that a new constitution could one day give them the right to self-determination.
It is only the third small change to the constitution for which the PP and PSOE have joined forces: in 1992, as a result of the Maastricht Treaty, the right to vote for EU citizens was expanded with two additional words. Another change occurred during the great financial crisis in the wake of austerity policies. This time too it was only a minimal compromise. Almost all parties agree that the constitution, which was passed more than forty years ago, is at least partially outdated and should be reformed. Smaller parties from the Basque Country and Valencia want to submit further proposals for constitutional changes in parliament this week.
But the Spanish constitutional fathers, under the impression of civil war and dictatorship, have tried to ensure that a broad political consensus is essential for this – especially when it comes to the core, such as the constitutional monarchy and changes to the national territory through the introduction of a referendum. This requires a two-thirds majority in both houses, a referendum and new elections. The new parliament must then reconfirm the change with a two-thirds majority. The newspaper “Periódico de España” called Tuesday's agreement the unfortunately “only oasis of understanding” between Sánchez and Feijóo, who still have to overcome much larger deadlocks.
The PP has been preventing the renewal of the head of the judiciary for years. The election of candidates for the Judicial Council and the Constitutional Court must also be approved by both chambers of parliament, the House of Representatives and the Senate, with a three-fifths majority.
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