Distribution of the Table of Congress: the most open battle in history that will anticipate the investiture of Sánchez or Feijóo

In the absence of a week for the first game to be resolved on the new political board that left the scrutiny of the polls, there is only one safe bet: Meritxell Batetno will once again be the PSOE candidate for the presidency of Congress. The distribution of both the main post of the Board of the Lower House and the remaining eight that will be made official on Thursday of next week is still being decided in negotiations against the clock and under the wrapper of discretion, but whose result will be a indicative of what can happen next with the investiture.

At this time, the block of forces on the right that support Alberto Núñez Feijóo is tied at 171 deputies with the “plurinational” that is expected to align monolithically with Pedro Sánchez. The direction that the legislature takes will depend on what Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) and the Canary Islands Coalition (CC) do on August 17, including the possibility of a repeat election.

But to reach that point, the first thing that the different interlocutors in Congress have to do is agree on the composition of the Table and since Sumar, the brand with which Podemos and 14 other political forces presented themselves to the elections, has begun to slip the idea that the presidency “does not have to be yes or yes for the PSOE”. The clearest voice that has been heard is that of Joan Baldoví, deputy for Compromís in the Valencian Parliament, who this Tuesday pointed out that the fact that any other party held it “would reflect the plurality of the results” of 23-J, reports Europa Press.

Until now, the highest position in the Lower House, which is supposed to be the third authority in the State, had always been occupied by a member of the party in charge of La Moncloa, which, in turn, had been the most voted in the last elections. The only exception occurred in the period from the motion of no confidence against Mariano Rajoy in May 2018 until the first call for elections in 2019, in which the popular Ana Pastor continued in office.

Assuming that Sánchez -who has not been the winner of the elections this time either- now agrees to cede the presidency of Congress to another formation in exchange for support for his eventual inauguration, it would be the first time that this coincidence of political acronyms would not take place. in both institutions. The request made from the ranks of Sumar is also joined by the number two of ERC for Barcelona, Teresa Jordà, who in an interview published on Monday in El Periódico suggested that one of the nine chairs of the Table, without specifying which, ” could belong to the independence movement or the PNV”, to which he added: “That is open and is part of the negotiations.”

Distribution

The distribution of posts in the body that organizes parliamentary work and sets the calendar of activities has always been the subject of agreements regardless of the representation of each of the forces to shield, as appropriate, a majority of left or right. In the distribution of 2019, the PSOE was left with three positions, the same as United We Can despite having been the fourth political force behind the PP, which obtained two, and Vox, with one.

In the framework of the negotiations that are taking place now, the popular had offered the PNV one of the positions of the Table in exchange for its support for the investiture of Feijóo after the Santiago Abascal party publicly announced that it was resigning from demand to enter the Government as the price of their votes. “We are going to do everything possible to make that happen,” stressed the vice president of Political Action for the formation, Jorge Buxadé, in an interview on Cadena Cope.

conversations

From the PP, they warn that they are not going to give up “to fight any battle” and stress that they have the ability to “talk to everyone and agree with almost everyone”, “to the right and left”. And in the PSOE they insist that they are holding “many conversations”, but they appeal to “discretion and prudence” so as not to reveal their claims, not even that of who their candidate for the presidency of Congress will be after the “personal” resignation of Batet.

The announcement came a day after the former spokesman for Podemos in the Lower House, Pablo Echenique, called the possibility of the Catalan politician repeating in office as “recklessness” and also called for a person to be elected of another party that “gathers the consensus of the different forces that make up the majority.”

From the mandate of Batet, who had led Congress since May 21, 2019, the controversy surrounding deputy Alberto Rodríguez stands out, convicted in October 2021 for attacking authority after assaulting a police officer in 2014. The controversy arose when, after ordering it by the Supreme Court, the president withdrew her seat, which led to the announcement of the filing of a complaint by the purple formation against her that remained a threat.