Invalidates the agreements of the Table at the beginning of the legislature that limit the times of intervention and the number of advisers to the formation chaired by Santiago Abascal
The Constitutional Court has annulled the cordon sanitaire imposed on Vox in the Basque Parliament. The High Court has partially upheld the appeal filed by the formation chaired by Santiago Abascal and has annulled the agreements adopted by the Legislative Board at the beginning of the legislature by which the intervention times were reduced to the only parliamentarian that the extreme right has in Vitoria, Amaya Martínez, and was denied the possibility of renaming the Mixed Group with the name of her party despite the fact that she is the only member.
The first agreement of the Table was registered on August 14, 2020. The legislature had just started, the Basque Government was not even constituted yet. The representatives of PNV, EH Bildu, PSE and Elkarrekin Podemos-IU gave the go-ahead to an agreement that cut Vox’s intervention times in plenary sessions of the Chamber to a third and limited its ability to present initiatives ( one every three ordinary plenary sessions and one interpellation and four questions every three control sessions). The pact justified the decision by ensuring that it is a “proportional” readjustment to the number of seats obtained by the formation led by Santiago Abascal. The problem is that the precedents are different: with the same representativeness, UPyD did not suffer any cut between 2009 and 2016.
The same thing happened the second time. On September 8 of that same year, the Table urged that the name Grupo Mixto-Vox be modified to eliminate the name of the party. This was not the case on previous occasions, for example, with the representatives of UPyD or Aralar who were part of the Mixed Group. Both could identify themselves with the names of their parties.
Vox denounced the situation, described it as “a cacicada”, and announced the presentation of an appeal for protection before the Constitutional Court. He was accepted for processing and just a month ago EL CORREO revealed that the analysis of him passed from a room of the Court of Guarantees to the Plenary after determining that there were indications of unconstitutionality in the actions of Parliament. The ruling, which was announced this Friday afternoon, determines that the right to political participation of the voters of the extreme right-wing formation and that of the party’s name has been violated, for which it will force the Basque Chamber to rectify.
“He has strayed from his customs”
The Constitutional Court considers that Parliament has violated article 23 of the Magna Carta, which establishes the ‘ius in officium’ (right to exercise representative public office). The sentence recalls that the Rules of the Chamber establish a “regime of equality” for all groups but that the Table has been applying “two different criteria” to determine participation in its sessions. “One of equality” that allows all groups except Vox to intervene “in the same way regardless of their number of members”, and another based on “the degree of representativeness” exclusively to the Mixed Group. In this sense, the Plenary Session of the Court of Guarantees has rejected the part of the amparo appeal that claimed that the number of advisers to the far-right formation had also been reduced. In this case, it is considered that the proportionality criterion is well applied.
Regarding the name of the Mixed Group, the ruling reproaches the Parliamentary Bureau for, in addition to not having presented convincing arguments to deny Vox’s request, “it has moved away” from its customs, recalling that in previous legislatures it did allow other parties add your name to the denomination. He also recalls that the internal organization and the name of the groups is a power of the parties that has been violated, with the aggravating circumstance that the only Vox parliamentarian “is the only member of the Mixed Group.”
What will happen from now? At the expense of Parliament deciding to appeal the ruling, Vox will operate under the same conditions as the rest of the groups in the Chamber of Vitoria. What he will not be able to avoid is that a second cordon sanitaire continues to be applied to him for ideological reasons. Since the beginning of the PNV legislature, EH Bildu and Elkarrekin Podemos-IU have not participated in the debates raised by the extreme right. The PSE-EE does it on time and only PP+Cs maintains “a normal relationship” with the party chaired by Santiago Abascal.
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