There was only one unanimous opinion this Thursday in Congress: the coups d'état are now carried out without machine guns – for the peace of mind of the parliamentary chroniclers without the vocation of being a war correspondent – they are carried out by squatting the institutions and perverting the democratic will. The majority that supports the coalition government said it, to allude to the claim of the PP that a Constitutional Constitutionalist with an expired mandate would prevent Congress from holding the session, and the right-wing said it, alluding to the claim of the majority to approve through amendments to a reform of the Penal Code and the system for appointing Constitutional magistrates. Hell is others, said Sartre.
The plenary session was harsh, with coarse and reciprocal allusions to the coup, but above all it was strange, since all morning the threat that the high court, meeting simultaneously, would accept the very precautionary demands demanded by the PP weighed like a stone on their lordships and forbade the legislator to legislate.
"Forty years ago the right wanted to stop democracy with three-cornered hats and today they have tried it with gowns." The phrase of the socialist Felipe Sicilia made the PP explode. Cuca Gamarra, his spokesman, with a broken voice throughout the plenary session, accused the Socialists of wanting to "rewrite history" and recalled that the 23F coup was against a center-right government, that of Adolfo Suárez. “What a shame!” he exclaimed.
Sicilia's phrase, which closed its intervention with an Albertian "gallop!", was the spigot that released the great tension accumulated in an uncomfortable plenary session, with such a dense air that it seemed to muffle the conversations in the courtyard and slow down the pace in common haste of their lordships. It was not the roughest of this period of sessions, among other reasons because the Vox deputies had left the chamber (although Javier Ortega Smith returned to speak from the rostrum and then, all his colleagues, to vote), but it was the session more overwhelmed by a legislature full of agonizing journeys that has traversed, so to speak, the Black Forest, the Ciénaga de los Muertos, the Pass of Cirith Ungol and the fires of Mount Doom. Many deputies, for opposite reasons, repeated that democracy was walking this Thursday on the very edge of an abyss of burning lava.
Knowing that the Constitutional Court had postponed the issue until Monday, PP, Vox and Ciudadanos intervened with previous issues to ask the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, to suspend the session. She did not, out of consideration for the chamber's sovereignty, she said. The leader of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, went further than Gamarra or Iván Espinosa de los Monteros and compared Batet to the former president of the Parliament of Catalonia, Carme Forcadell, imprisoned by the Supreme Court, a veiled threat that the Esquerra spokesman, Gabriel Rufián he reproached severely.
Since early morning there were mentions of the legal terra incognita that we were treading on, from Ferran Bel (PDeCAT) to Rufián (ERC), including Jon Iñarritu (EH-Bildu), Joan Baldoví (Compromís), Pablo Echenique (UP), Mieria Vehí (CUP) and even Ana Oramas (CC). There were many deputies who alluded to the grotesque situation of a plenary session under threat or intimidation from another institution, as if somehow the exile of large Venezuelan capitals that has taken over the center of Madrid had soaked the institutional dialectic with Caracas airs. The paradox is capital: the Venezuelanization of Spanish politics was going to be brought about, said the oracles, by the young people of the new left, but it has turned out to land on exactly the opposite side.
