The Senate Interior Committee convened by the PP this Wednesday to address the Ceuta crisis ended with the twenty or so Popular Party senators present taking a photograph. They all gathered behind the speakers’ table in the Clara Campoamor room, leaving visible the “empty chair” of Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska in the center, accompanied by the sign “attendee”. Then, one of the parliamentarians made a joke: “One should be requested that says absent without excuse.”
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The photograph and the joke were the culmination of several days in which the clash between the Executive and the Popular Party over the requests for appearances of several ministers registered in the Senate by the PP, with an absolute majority in the upper chamber, has been consummated. This Wednesday the first of the appointments was scheduled, that of the Interior Committee. As he had warned, Marlaska did not attend. While the parliamentary session was taking place, the minister was following the special operation for the solar eclipse at the headquarters of the General Secretariat of Civil Protection and Emergencies in Madrid. And he already stated that he will give explanations about Ceuta in Congress at the end of the month. But, for Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party, that justification has no validity whatsoever.
The session started at 11:00. Besides the PP, there was only representation from Vox and Junts. The president of the Committee, Popular Party senator Fernando Martínez-Maíllo, entered the Clara Campoamor room followed by the rest of his colleagues. And he began his speech by noting the minister’s absence. “It is evident that he has not appeared. The minister’s empty chair is unjustifiable, a lack of respect to the Senate and he is failing a constitutional and legal obligation,” Martínez-Maíllo asserted. “Another date could not be enabled because there has been an inexcusable attitude of disobedience. It is an act of deliberate disobedience,” he concluded. The PP senator then warned that “the appropriate political and legal decisions” will be taken so that Marlaska’s absence “does not go without consequences.” PP parliamentary sources say their advisors are studying all possible legal avenues to challenge the breach of his “legal obligation” to appear, although they point out that the most plausible is to raise a conflict of competencies before the Constitutional Court, as they have already done on similar occasions.
The extraordinary session lasted about 40 minutes. The spokespeople of the PP, Vox, and Junts spoke to offer their arguments, attack the Government, and voice the questions they would have asked the minister, they expressed. On behalf of the Popular Party, the senator for Ceuta Cristina Díaz took the floor. “What continues to happen in Ceuta is serious enough not to wait. The Senate is not answered when the ministers’ vacations end,” said the parliamentarian, whose voice broke at times. “We are terrified for our children and our elders,” Díaz stated. “You can tell she is a senator for Ceuta and lives it with that intensity,” the Committee president said afterwards before giving the floor to Vox senator Ángel Pelayo Gordillo.
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The far-right parliamentarian launched the arguments that Santiago Abascal’s party has been reiterating since the arrival of 72,000 people to the autonomous city. “Chaos has broken out in Ceuta, there are incessant warnings that it could happen again,” Pelayo Gordillo asserted, who announced that his party will register a new request for Marlaska’s appearance after his absence this Wednesday. “This contempt is one more step towards that situation that Vox has been denouncing for a long time, Mr. Sánchez’s wishes to become an autocrat,” added the Vox senator. The PP later responded that they agree with the far-right in asking the minister again to appear for Ceuta in the Senate: they will call him again for a date.
Finally, Junts senator Eduard Pujol took advantage of his speech to lash out at everyone. “What a circus the two big parties of political Spain have set up,” Pujol defended. And he used the occasion to again demand the central Government transfer competencies to Catalonia in immigration matters. “Today I would have liked to say just one word to the minister: irresponsible,” the Junts parliamentarian concluded, who asked that his presence there, alongside the PP and Vox, not be used to lump them together. “Ceuta and Melilla are your concern, we are Catalans,” he concluded, unleashing murmurs from the Popular bench.
The session ended with the Committee president thanking the legal advisor of the Board and the rest of the workers who had “interrupted their vacations” after the extraordinary call and during a non-working period. Both the Populars and Vox remembered the earthquake victims but barely mentioned the hundred deaths at the Ceuta border. On Monday, the Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, is called, and on Tuesday, the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles. The PP is clear that the first will not attend either and the photo of the “absent without excuse” will be repeated. They still have hopes with Robles.
