ABC Editorial: Govern without counterpowers

More than a warning, it was an announcement. When at the beginning of last September Pedro Sánchez suggested the possibility of governing with or without the support of the Cortes, in a declaration of intentions foreign to the mechanisms of a democratic system of counter-powers, he was not only recognizing his inability to close agreements with his partners parliamentarians and materialize them in laws, but advancing the key to a Caesarist strategy that since then has led him to ignore the control mechanisms enabled at the seat of national sovereignty. Of the ten question sessions to the Government held since September 7, when the Chief Executive made that approach official, Sánchez has only attended four, multiplying his sit-ins to the Lower House by eight. He has not even attended the Senate, where the opposition is the majority, since last March. This de facto overcoming of the system of balances between the powers of the State – which also involves the disqualification of the courts, already programmatic, and the incorporation of the doctrine of persecution – extends to some ministers who have not been slow to make this their own. exercise of evasion, with notable cases such as the one carried out by the now community vice president, Teresa Ribera, who only appeared in two of the nine control sessions called since September.

Already made official, this contempt for the legislative power, considered an obstacle, like the judicial branch, for government action of a personalistic nature, is not new. The closure of the Cortes during the first phase of the Covid pandemic was declared unconstitutional by the TC, and there have been many occasions in which, through its president or its senior lawyer, the Congress of Deputies has limited itself to apply the slogans coming from La Moncloa. The grotesque session of the Finance Commission that in mid-November was suspended for hours to allow the Government to negotiate its fiscal projects outside the walls; The extraordinary plenary session in which, after the suspension of the session and while the bodies of the Valencia flood were being located, the RTVE decree was validated, or the undisguised plan to neutralize the Senate as a legislative chamber respond to a very defined strategy of overcoming the current model of counterweights. Governing with or without the support of the Cortes, as the Chief Executive announced at the start of the new political course, not only consists of avoiding the control sessions of the Lower House, but also of using it at the convenience of one party, reduced to a mere appendix. from La Moncloa.

The institutional deterioration is not only a consequence, as in other legislatures, of the effect of corruption, a phenomenon that also appears on the horizon of the PSOE and the Government, but of an approach based on the absolute intervention of the State. With a parliamentary minority that prevents it from developing a minimally defined project, barely guided by opportunism, and forced to reward with concessions that border on legality to partners whose program involves precisely the disarmament of the legal system, the Executive survives the counter: in front of the courts of justice, which he shamelessly accuses of practicing ‘lawfare’, and in front of the Cortes, without which Pedro Sánchez is demonstrating that he can govern, understanding this activity as a simple expression of what in its manual it described it as ‘resistance’.