Alberto Casero’s vote in favor of the labor reform is now final. The Constitutional Court has rejected the appeal that the former PP deputy filed against the decisions of Congress that, in 2022, denied him the possibility of repeating or changing the meaning of his vote after making a mistake by doing it electronically from home. The support of the Popular Party was decisive for the standard, one of the most important of the last legislature, to be adopted by the coalition government, with a single vote difference.
The plenary assembly understands that the verification of their vote was carried out “in accordance with the parliamentary regulations applicable at the time of the events”. It also confirms that his vote in person was not subsequently authorized: “It was his responsibility, due to the responsibility he exercised as a member of one of the Legislative Chambers, to exercise extreme diligence if he considered it appropriate to participate in person in the plenary session” due to illness. The decision of the Constitutional Court was unanimous, although two judges, Enrique Arnaldo and Concepción Espejel, announced concurrent votes.
Alberto Casero, then a PP deputy from Cáceres, voted that day electronically with the system implemented as a result of the pandemic: a double check in which parliamentarians not only vote for or against an initiative, but must then confirm that they voted correctly. Casero said “yes” to the labor reform promoted by the coalition government, a measure to which his party was firmly opposed. After the two deputies of the Unión del Pueblo Navarro – now in the ranks of the PP – broke their party agreements and voted against, Casero’s unexpected support was decisive for the labor reform to be approved with 175 votes in favor and 174 against.
In a matter of weeks, the Popular Party abandoned the conspiracy theory it had tried to launch, according to which some kind of computer error in the Congress candidacy had transformed Casero’s refusal into a key support for labor reform. After the deputy himself acknowledged to the Cadena SER that he had made a mistake, the right launched a legal offensive against the decisions of the table and the presidency of the Congress, preventing him from changing or repeating his vote.
In total, four appeals for protection have been presented to the Constitutional Court: one by Casero, two others by the Popular Party and another by Vox. Once the first one was rejected with the support of the prosecution, sources from the Guarantee Court explain to elDiario.es that the rest of the challenges will follow the same path.
The resources that raised the main debate on whether the internal regulations of Congress that came into force ten years ago, which required a phone call from Parliament to the deputy to verbally verify that his telematic vote was correct, could be considered applicable to Casero’s case. This regulation, however, declined two years before the vote on the labor reform, when the pandemic led to a change of model so that the verification of the vote was carried out by the deputy himself.
