The Popular Party (PP) has decided not to escalate the conflict of powers between the Senate and the Congress to its final conclusion for the time being. Despite having an absolute majority in the upper house, the party has rejected the idea of denouncing the lower house to the Constitutional Court at this time. The conflict arose when the Senate approved the institutional clash over the amnesty law on April 10th, a mechanism never before used in 45 years of democracy. The deadline to finalize the process was set for this Friday, the deadline to appeal to the guarantor court, after the Congress responded to the Senate on April 16th with a report stating that the conditions for the conflict were not met. The PP argues that it should have been the Congress plenary, not the Lower House’s Mesa, to respond, and they plan to withdraw the procedure in a plenary meeting scheduled for next Thursday, asking for more time for the Lower House to respond. There have been doubts within the PP regarding the relevance of pursuing the appeal, despite the initial noise generated by this strategy.
The conflict of powers occurs when one State body – in this case, the Senate – believes that another State body – the Congress – has made decisions assuming powers that do not belong to it. The initiating body informs the allegedly invading body and requests that it revoke its decision. If there is no response within a month, or if the response denies the allegation, the initiating body can then refer the issue to the Constitutional Court for resolution. The Senate declared the conflict of powers open on April 10th for the Congress to respond afterwards. The measure was approved by 148 votes in favor (144 from the PP, 3 from Vox, and one from Coalición Canaria), with UPN abstaining and the rest of the chamber voting against it (112 senators).
The PP considers the amnesty law to be a “covert constitutional reform”, as stated in the Senate’s legal report, and thus believes that its approval requires a qualified majority instead of the absolute majority garnered by the PSOE and its allies in Congress to pass the amnesty for those involved in the procés. Based on this reasoning, the PP concluded that there was a conflict of powers between the two chambers. After six days, the Congress Mesa responded negatively. Following this response, the PP had until May 17th to decide whether or not to go to the Constitutional Court. However, the party led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been wavering on the decision for almost a month without clarifying whether they would take the final step. The Senate Mesa, governed by the PP, did submit a document criticizing the Congress Mesa’s response, stating that it denied the deputies the right to debate the issue in the chamber. In line with this argument, the PP group in the Senate submitted a document on Tuesday to withdraw the conflict of powers appeal.
While the announcement of registering the conflict of powers in the upper house generated a lot of attention initially, there were doubts within the PP from the start about whether to transfer the institutional clash to the Constitutional Court, according to party sources. The PP distrusts the guarantor court due to its progressive majority, and therefore feared that if the Constitutional Court rejected the conflict, the subsequent appeal against the amnesty law would be more challenging. The PP confirmed that they will file a constitutional appeal on the substance of the amnesty law once it is definitively approved by Congress, likely at the end of this month. They also feared that a favorable ruling from the Constitutional Court would complicate a subsequent appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Despite these concerns, the PP decided to proceed with the institutional clash.
In the midst of these developments, the Aragon Consultative Council issued a opinion on Tuesday legitimizing the regional government, led by PP and Vox, to file a constitutional appeal against the amnesty law “once it is adopted, as it affects the interests of Aragon derived from the historical, economic, social, and cultural relations that the Aragon Autonomous Community maintains with Catalonia, as well as affecting the unity of the Spanish nation, of which Catalonia and Aragon are a part”, the document states. The PP leadership and other regional governments governed by the PP, such as Aragon and the Region of Murcia, had previously announced their intention to challenge the amnesty before the Constitutional Court.
