The rebellion that the PP encourages in the PSOE deputies to break with their party and vote in favor of the investiture of Alberto Nuñez Feijóo brings to mind the tamayazowhich ended up (after an electoral process) by making Esperanza Aguirre president of the Community of Madrid in 2003.
So, two PSOE parliamentarians, Eduardo Tamayo and Maria Teresa Saezdestroyed the expectations of the PSOE Government -led by Rafael Simancas- and IU, who had reached a legislative pact.
The play, that fraud, it turned out paradoxically profitable for the right, who won the following elections, called immediately. Since then, the PP has governed the Community of Madrid uninterruptedly.
The ‘tamayazo’ was paradoxically profitable for the PP
What mechanisms exist in the legislation to stop something like this today, to prevent a scandal like that from being repeated? There is a pact called for institutional stability, signed – in 1998 in its first version and renewed in November 2020 – by the majority parties, including the PP, although this party challenged it in 2021 after the failed PSOE motion in Murcia , which points out that transfuguism is a “form of corruption.”
In its addendum III it includes this definition: “For the purposes of this agreement, turncoats are understood to be the local, regional and state representatives who, betraying the political subject (political parties, coalitions or groups of voters) that the presented to the corresponding elections, have abandoned it, have been expelled or deviate from the criteria established by their competent bodies”.
In other words, if a PSOE parliamentarian voted in favor of the investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, he would automatically be considered a turncoat, according to this conception, since he would break the “criterion” of the party, which is to vote no to the investiture of the president of the PP.
But what consequences would it have for him to do so? The answer is that, if he does it exclusively for reasons of conscience, without bribery, blackmail or coercion – in which case the case would go before a criminal court – he would probably be expelled from his party and the parliamentary group. . And little else can be done, according to jurist Joaquín Urías.
If he does so for reasons of conscience, without bribery, he would be expelled from his party and the parliamentary group.
“If there was a tamayazo next week, there would be no action to take against those people. They could be expelled from the socialist group and the PSOE and they would move to the mixed group in Congress. But there is no other additional punishment nor is there one in the law. At the local level, yes, at the Congress level, no because each representative represents the entire country. There is no imperative mandate. Each deputy can do what he wants. The Constitution, in fact, prohibits him from leaving with a prior mandate to Parliament. Absolutely nothing can be done there,” says Urías to Public.
The Constitutional
The value of the anti-trafficking pact is, thus, ethical and moral, but it does not have a legal component for the deputies in Congress, as it does in the city councils – and also, in its spirit, in some regulations of the parliaments of Autonomous Communities –, which decree sanctions and restrictions for traitors.
The text of the 2020 agreement itself recognizes the difficulties of preventing it in Congress because the Constitutional Court establishes every time it has occasion that the record belongs to the deputy and not the party for which he stood for election, as has happened again. –with some nuances– in the case of the expulsion, declared unconstitutional, of Teresa Rodriguez and eight other deputies from the Adelante Andalucía group.
This is what the anti-transfuguism pact itself states: “It has been a reiterated doctrine of the Constitutional Court that it is impossible to remove from their representative position those institutional representatives whose representation has been conferred directly by the Electoral Body, even when they have abandoned or been expelled from the political party that presented them. In other words, whoever has been directly elected by universal suffrage by the people cannot be separated from the ownership granted by the people.”
The Congress regulations include in its article 22 the causes for which a deputy can lose his status. There are four: final judicial decision; death or incapacity of the deputy; termination of the mandate and resignation before the Board.
The Congress regulations include in its article 22 the causes for which a deputy can lose his status
In any case, regardless of the legal considerations, the statements of different leaders of the PP, such as those of the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonillain which he calls on PSOE deputies to break with party discipline in his favor, represent a clear and evident call to transfuguism, as defined in the last pact.
In the 2020 agreement, the PP signed that it was necessary to combat transfuguism “in all institutional spheres, since it is a form of corruption and an undemocratic practice that alters the majorities expressed by citizens at the polls.” Today, after challenging him in 2021, its leaders call with some relief PSOE deputies to vote in favor of their leader.
