For the third time since he was proclaimed King before the Courts in 2014, Felipe VI yesterday opened a new legislature in Spain in a solemn joint session held in Congress. Once again, with Pedro Sánchez as president of the Spanish Government, whom he congratulated for his re-election, together with the new progressive coalition Executive, whose ministers he wished "success" in their duties.
A show of institutional normality that contrasted with the great political polarization that Parliament is experiencing, and that even yesterday did not grant a minimum respite.
"The obligation of all institutions is to bequeath to the young a solid and united Spain, without divisions or confrontations", requested the King. And he defended, as a "primary political value" of the Parliament, "the integration of different options and projects within the Constitution".
Felipe VI warned the deputies and senators that the public had placed in them "the most precious political asset: trust". And he entrusted them with the task that "political pluralism promotes the improvement of the living conditions of the people and groups in which it is integrated".
The King vindicated the Constitution and, also in the presence of Princess Eleonor, who at the age of majority has just promised the Magna Carta, emphasized the young people. "To face the future with confidence, to face an era of great changes and transformations, they need a democratic framework, like the one represented by the Constitution, that allows them to live together and prosper in freedom," he said. "And they need to receive a cohesive and united Spain where they can develop their lives and project their dreams", he said.
He assured that the Constitution "establishes freedom, equality, justice and political pluralism as values on which our democratic coexistence is based". "Values that are not anchored in the past and that must be projected into the future", he pointed out.
The Head of State defended that "the search for understanding, the recognition of our differences, together with mutual respect as citizens, the certainty that only by overcoming divisions do freedoms and rights have a secure basis, be decisive ideas and attitudes to open a new page in our history".
"Claiming the deep meaning of this great pact between the Spanish that is at the origin of our democracy is not, at all, looking back with nostalgia", he warned, but "a proud and conscious reaffirmation of our best abilities as a country and of the best achievement that orders, in our days, the life of Spanish society: the Constitution". For this reason, "we must honor its spirit, respect it and comply with it, to make effective the definition of Spain as a social and democratic State of right", warned the King. In 1978, with the Constitution, Spain reached "its best expression in mutual understanding without impositions or exclusions and in the desire for integration that enriches, with diversity and pluralism, our common project, our bond emotional and supportive as a nation", emphasized Felipe VI.
But his appeal for unity again hit the wall of the chamber's partisan division. The Popular Party and Vox groups were already very irritated by the previous speech of the president of the Congress, the socialist Francina Armengol, who refused to applaud even as a sign of parliamentary respect in the presence of the King.
Armengol defended the Constitution and parliamentary democracy, but celebrated the "social and economic stability" of Spain, many laws that bear the signature of the PSOE, and the formation of the new Government, thanks to a parliamentary majority that, he emphasized , is legitimate and emanates from the will of the citizens at the polls. He even quoted the poet Joan Margarit in Catalan. And he regretted, on the other hand, "the tension, the polarization and the noise" that shakes the parliamentary scene.
"It's unfortunate", disqualified the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. "It is the worst speech by a president of the Congress that I have heard in my life", he warned. The PP denounced a "partisan and sectarian" bias in Armengol's words. And also the leader of the far-right, Santiago Abascal, described his speech as a "rally", after warning that the legislature "is in the hands of coup plotters".
The solemn session recorded the absence of the nationalist and pro-independence groups on which the legislature is based, with the exception of the PNB spokesperson. The leader of Podemos, Ione Belarra, also attended, who bet, however, that the head of state be elected at the polls. "It is an increasingly majority demand of Spanish society", he assured.
