Sánchez renounces to intervene before the Eurochamber in the middle of the campaign

The call for early elections in Spain on July 23 has taken away one of the most deeply rooted traditions of European parliamentary life, the appearance of the president of the Council of the Union to present his priorities for the new semester.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
03 June 2023 Saturday 04:59
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Sánchez renounces to intervene before the Eurochamber in the middle of the campaign

The call for early elections in Spain on July 23 has taken away one of the most deeply rooted traditions of European parliamentary life, the appearance of the president of the Council of the Union to present his priorities for the new semester.

The intervention of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, was scheduled for July 13, but yesterday Moncloa requested by letter the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to postpone until September, after the elections, the 'act of presentation of the Spanish agenda for the EU so that it does not coincide with the final stretch - and official period - of the electoral campaign. The Eurochamber has confirmed that it will adapt the calendar to Spain's needs.

Moncloa insists that she had discussed the possibility of a postponement with the press service of the European Parliament this Tuesday, "24 hours after the announcement of early elections", but the initiative did not take place until yesterday, through an unusual statement of the press released a couple of hours after it was known that the European political family of the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, was mobilizing to try to deprive Sánchez of a potential moment of brilliance in Europe and that the leader of the EPP, Manfred Weber, had sent a letter to Metsola in which he asked to delay the event.

Parliamentary sources have confirmed that Moncloa established informal contacts to probe the institution about precedents for a possible postponement, but these intentions were not formally notified until yesterday Friday. Controversies aside about who took the first step, in reality, the Government and the PPE agree that the coincidence of the speech with the electoral campaign was a bad idea. "In view of these exceptional circumstances, I ask you to consider postponing the date of presentation of the program of activities of the Spanish presidency from July to September, to allow the newly elected Prime Minister to present the Council's priorities to aside from the national electoral battles", defends Weber.

"I trust that this small adjustment in our institutional calendar will strengthen the legitimacy of the process", he adds, pointing to the risk of politicization of this exercise. Postponing the presentation speech on Spain's priorities during the six-month presidency "will strengthen our ability to act on our common priorities", concludes the head of the Bavarian EPP, very mobilized to get the PP to regain power in Spain and his political group regains the reins of power in at least one of the major EU countries.

The provisional agenda for the July plenary session will be decided at the meeting of the Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament, which consists of Metsola herself and the leaders of all the groups, scheduled for June 15. According to parliamentary sources, it will not even be necessary to discuss the issue because, directly, Sánchez's intervention will not appear in the draft agenda for the July session, parliamentary sources explain. "We cannot force anyone", they indicate. In any case, popular European sources assure that Weber's proposal would have gone ahead, since the liberal group had expressed its intention to abstain in the hypothetical vote.

Weber's unusual maneuver illustrates once again the extent to which Brussels has become a kind of branch of Spanish politics, as seen for example with the controversy over Doñana, judicial independence or the Spanish recovery plan. Although there are precedents for holding national elections to coincide with the current European presidency, none of the recent documented cases was just three weeks before taking the reins of the EU. Regarding the results, the only precedent of a change of head of government via elections in the middle of the European presidency dates back to Italy in 1996.