The Vox spokesperson in the Madrid Assembly, Rocío Monasterio, will appeal to court the sanction of 15 days without pay that the Parliament Bureau imposed on her for voting twice on the same initiative during the plenary session on February 1. This was announced this Monday by the leader of the ultra party at a press conference after learning that the body that regulates the day-to-day operations of the Chamber has rejected her appeal, leaving her with no room for maneuver on the parliamentary front. Although Monasterio faced being suspended as a deputy for a month, in addition to losing her salary during that time (charges 4,244.85 euros per month), the instructor of the file opened against her, Mercedes Zarzalejo, advocated applying the principle of proportionality, since her vote did not affect the result of the initiative put to vote (the amendment to the entirety presented by Más Madrid against the economic law Government circular).
“We will take the sanction file to all those fronts in which we can appeal: the contentious-administrative, the Constitutional,” said Monasterio. “We have to see what avenues we have, but we are not going to leave it here, it is clear. “We, with salary or without salary, continue working the same,” he continued. “We are seeing an assault on the institutions, on the Chamber of Accounts, on the Transparency Council, on Telemadrid, in this absolutist majority of Mrs. Ayuso,” he added.
Monasterio has also asked that the Más Madrid deputy Pablo Padilla be sanctioned for making the gesture of shooting with a gun while the regional president was speaking during the last plenary session. For the spokesperson, it would be “a scandal” if she were punished with 15 days’ pay for voting twice in the same initiative and the representative of the left-wing party was not sanctioned, as Vox has officially requested.
However, they are different cases. Fining Padilla, reflects a parliamentary source, opens a door that is very difficult to close: that of punishing the frequent angry gestures that occur in the plenary session, for which there would be a clear criterion on what is unacceptable (imitating a gunshot) but not about what is acceptable. On the other hand, they consider in Parliament, what Monasterio did does deserve sanction and is clearly typified in the regulations. Here are the details of your case, step by step:
January 25. José Luis Ruiz Bartolomé, Monasterio’s right-hand man in the chamber, leaves his seat to return to private activity. Vox has one week to replace him before the first plenary session of the new session. It is not that it is urgent either: the PP has an absolute majority and its presence will not change anything.
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January 31. One day before the plenary session, Pablo Gutiérrez de Cabiedes resigns from occupying the seat, which corresponds to him because he is next on the electoral list. His decision exacerbates the crisis of a party that has gone from controversy to controversy in recent months. And so, Vox arrives at the plenary session the next day without its new deputy, Javier Pérez, having taken office and, therefore, with one less vote and an empty chair.
February 1st. At the end of the plenary session, the president of the Assembly, Enrique Ossorio (PP), takes the floor to give a warning before voting begins. “Before starting to vote, I clarify that a deputy, by mistake, has pressed the presence button in two different seats,” announces the former regional vice president, who downplays the importance of that action. The controversy, in fact, explodes later, when the technical services of the Chamber detect that a vote has been taken from the seat of Ruiz Bartolomé, who is no longer a deputy and has not been replaced by Vox. That is, someone has voted twice.
February 5th. Ossorio decides to open an investigation and all eyes immediately turn to Monasterio: deputy Íñigo Henríquez de Luna admits at the meeting of spokespersons that he activated two different places as present, because he did not want the seat next to Monasterio to remain empty, which unsightly in front of the cameras. But he finally returned to his seat. The leader of Vox is the one who comes to admit having voted several times, although she does not express it clearly either.
“It’s technology stuff,” Monasterio laughs during a press conference in which he describes himself pressing and unpressing buttons in a hurry to try to turn off the seat. But no one takes the matter as a joke in Parliament. And much less the PP, which sees an ideal opportunity to settle outstanding accounts with her former partner, or in the left-wing opposition, in which Más Madrid registers a letter requesting that she be suspended as a deputy for 30 days.
Nothing like this had ever happened in the Madrid Assembly, according to a spokesperson for the institution. But there are precedents outside the region. For example, in the Basque Country. There, in 2003, Parliament sanctioned Carlos Iturgaiz with one month without being able to exercise his rights for having activated the electronic presence indicator in the Chamber of his colleague Jaime Mayor Oreja.
February 8th. In the middle of a control session of his Government, Ayuso is committed to sanctioning Monasterio for his action. “If you are going on a road where you have to drive at 80 [kilómetros por hora], and they catch you at 140, Mrs. Monasterio, you will understand that you will have to be fined,” assures the regional president. “What has not been seen in life is that I vote for another deputy who is absent,” she denounces. Monasterio responds by assuring that the conservative leader seeks to expel her from the Chamber at all costs, and she jokes, gesturing, when the end of the session arrives, it is time for her to vote, and she makes grandiloquent movements at every step.
February 9. The Assembly Board decides to launch the process that will likely end up sanctioning the spokesperson of the far-right party.
April 4. EL PAÍS accesses the content of the sanction proposal signed by Zarzalejo, which has been confirmed by the Assembly Board on April 10 and, again, on May 27 after the appeal registered by Monasterio, which now only has the through justice to reverse the decision.
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