Green light to expand the cases of telematic voting in the Parliament of Catalonia and shield the remote votes of Carles Puigdemont, Lluís Puig and Ruben Wagensberg. The PSC, Junts, ERC, Comuns-Sumar and the CUP have registered this Friday a proposal to reform the Parliament’s regulations that, among others, expands the range of cases of voting delegation to allow escaped deputies to take advantage of this option of Spanish justice. The processing of the change has to go through the Parliament’s table and, then, the board of spokespersons must incorporate it into the agenda. The modification will be activated through a single reading which, according to Parliament sources, gives it express character and could make its approval possible during a procedure that would take place in two consecutive plenary sessions. There is discretion to call plenary sessions when appropriate and, according to technical staff of the Parliament, there could even be room to approve the modification before August 26, the maximum period that deputies have to elect a president of the Generalitat and avoid the repetition of elections in Catalonia.
The reform, which will be approved because the aforementioned five formations guarantee to achieve a parliamentary majority, will allow Junts parliamentarians Carles Puigdemont and Lluís Puig to vote by proxy. Both left Spain to avoid being tried for their participation in the 1-O referendum in 2017 and, despite the approval of the amnesty law, they continue to reside abroad for fear of being arrested if they enter Spain. The regulatory amendment also opens the door to giving full validity to the telematic vote of ERC deputy Ruben Wagensberg, who left for Geneva (Switzerland) after being judicially linked to the ‘Tsunami Democràtic’ case. Wagensberg is on medical leave and, for this reason, could vote remotely. The legal reform protects his vote from abroad, regardless of his state of health. By granting full validity to the 20 votes that ERC has in the Parliament, the leader of the PSC Salvador Illa guarantees himself the ability to add a majority for his investiture, 68 deputies, in case he ends up closing a pact with the Republicans and the Comuns. The leader of the PP in Catalonia, Alejandro Fernández, has criticized the sudden alliance of the PSC with the independentists. “Those who promised to ‘end the process‘Now they are leading it. And there are still some who demand that we support Illa,” Fernández said on his X network account.
For the moment, the agreement between the PSC, the Comuns and the three pro-independence parties comes after the Constitutional Court (TC) accepted ten days ago the appeal of the PP against the decision of the Parliament’s Age Board to admit the delegated vote of Puigdemont and Puig, which allowed the members of the Board to be elected and the Catalan chamber to be formed.
At the beginning of the month, the Constitutional Court granted protection to an appeal filed last term, precisely by the PSC, against several decisions of the Catalan Parliament that allowed MP Lluís Puig (Junts) to vote electronically in the plenary sessions of the autonomous Chamber. The TC ruling annuls these agreements and concludes that they violated the rights of socialist deputies by creating an exception in the voting system that benefited another political group: Junts. The court stressed in its ruling that the obligation to vote in person has exceptions, but these do not apply in the case of “someone who has voluntarily decided to avoid the action of the Spanish criminal jurisdiction and who is subject to a judicial search and arrest warrant.” The reform of the regulations now makes the criteria more flexible.
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Other changes planned in the text that regulates the operation of the autonomous chamber are that parliamentary groups are formed using the method already used in the Congress of Deputies and that institutional declarations are passed only by a qualified majority of two thirds.
The reform of the system of affiliation of parliamentary groups means that deputies will be able to change from one parliamentary group to another during the first five days of each session. If the reform is approved, they will have an exceptional ten extra days to make changes in the groups.
This will allow one of the parliamentary groups to cede deputies to the CUP, which does not have enough to form its own group. Once the CUP is established as a parliamentary group, the deputies who have been ceded will be able to return to their group of origin. Until now, the Regulations did not allow deputies to change groups again and they were forced to stay or move to the Mixed Group, which it currently shares with Aliança Catalana.
As regards institutional declarations, they can be approved by a qualified majority of two-thirds of the Board of Spokespersons and by the President of the Parliament, and not unanimously, as until now. The new mechanism makes it possible to avoid the ability of the far-right groups, Vox and Aliança Catalana, to torpedo the positioning of the chamber on issues that generate social consensus.
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