To avoid the feeling and public perception of having reached an agreement on something, PSOE and PP sometimes play genuine games of parliamentary poker in Congress. With different tricks. It happened this Tuesday at the meeting to establish the table of the two identical commissions of inquiry approved last May on the events of the blackout of April 28th. The PP attempted to ensure that only its commission prospered by encouraging the presidency of PNV MP Idoia Sagastizabal and then proposing the dissolution of the session promoted by the PSOE. The PSOE did not accept it and forced another vote, with the same president and the same composition of the Council, which went ahead and will now try with its partners to kill the PP’s initiative.
Congress decided on May 28, a month after the terrible blackout that left all of Spain and much of the Iberian peninsula in darkness, to form two commissions of inquiry to discover the causes of this zero energy, but the two alleged blocs of the House did not then agree on how to organize those sessions. The two ideas went forward and this Tuesday the unprecedented scenario was established that in the same morning, with just half an hour’s time, two identical commissions, with the same members, the same president and a similar work agenda, even if with different objectives. Junts voted in favor of both.
First, the PP-sponsored commission was convened and in it, to the surprise of some members, Guillermo Mariscal, third secretary of the Congress Council and an experienced popular deputy, proposed the PNV parliamentarian, Idoia Sagastizabal, as president and refrained from appointing a member of his group to that key position leading the sessions in a commission of inquiry. All parties supported the candidacy and Mariscal tried to thus conclude the meeting and conclude the next commission requested by the PSOE with the topic of the alleged transfer granted by the PP. Mariscal regretted that the socialists were not present at that meeting and, due to the lack of a quorum, this proposal would have been discarded. It didn’t add up.
The PSOE asked for its initiative to be voted on, also with Sagastizabal as president, and the same composition of the Table, with a socialist first vice-president, a second vice-president of the PP, and then a deputy from the PP and Vox. The intention of the socialist group now is that when this second Table meets it can advance the work calendar and the appearances desired by the parties of the investiture bloc and that the first one is allowed to die without being convened, which would end up dissolving or that both would end up merging.
The socialist speaker of the Chamber, Patxi López, argued in his favor that it would be “common sense” for only one antiblackout commission to function in the end to “not duplicate appearances” and assumes that this will be the will of all groups, even if the PP has not expressed itself in this sense.
The chair, PNV MP Idoia Sagastizabal, made it clear in her first speech that she will be “tough and technical” in her work and that she will try to avoid the usual scuffles of these types of sessions so that the commission draws “neutrality” conclusions that provide a way forward for the future.
