The Popular Party announced this Sunday that it will bring to the next Senate plenary session on Wednesday, September 8, the censures of five ministers ―the Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, the Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, the Health Minister, Mónica García, and the Equality Minister, Ana Redondo― for their management in Ceuta. Alberto Núñez-Feijóo’s party will also raise a new conflict of powers due to “the repeated absences of the Government in the Senate,” which is the first step to take this conflict to the Constitutional Court.
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The PP spokesperson in the upper chamber, Alicia García, stated in a press release distributed this Sunday that “the empty seats of the ministers cannot go unpunished” and that they will continue “taking the Government’s decision to hide from the Senate and flee from the Spanish people to the courts.” This conflict of powers involves raising a kind of clash between constitutional bodies of the State which, if not resolved within a month, will end up in the court led by Cándido Conde-Pumpido.
García describes the “incompetence” of Marlaska, Albares, and Robles as a “real shame” who, she says, preferred to “escape” from the Senate to give their explanations in the Congress, the chamber that, she points out, “suits them, on the date that suits them and under the conditions that suit them.” During August, the PP had summoned the heads of Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Defense regarding what was happening in Ceuta, but they decided to appear in Congress where they explained how their management had been.
Feijóo’s party had already appealed to the Supreme Court requesting as a precautionary measure that the Government be ordered to ensure that the ministers appeared within a maximum period of 24 hours. But the vacation chamber of the high court denied this request as it was not “sufficiently justified that the parliamentary control that the appellants” linked to the “effective exercise” of their work as senators and which is enshrined in Article 23 of the Constitution, should “necessarily take place, to be effective, within the extraordinary period of the month of August.”
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The party now clings to Article 110.1 of the Magna Carta which allows both chambers to demand the presence of Government members, as well as Article 66.2 of the Senate Regulations which establishes that members of the Executive are obliged to appear. It is not an invitation. It is not an institutional courtesy. It is a constitutional and parliamentary obligation,” the spokesperson emphasized. “The Government cannot unilaterally choose which Chamber controls it, when it appears, or under what conditions it does so. Those subject to parliamentary control cannot choose who controls them,” she concluded.
The PP has maintained that the non-appearance of the ministers in the chamber where they have an absolute majority and the president, Pedro Sánchez, remaining on vacation in the Canary Islands during the summer month, were a display of “shame, nonsense, and arrogance,” so it had already decided to push for censures in upcoming plenary sessions.
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