Spanish Radio Television has a new president. José Pablo López will lead the public company for the next six years after obtaining approval from Congress. He needed a second round this Thursday, where he could be elected by an absolute majority made up of the Government and its partners, with 178 votes in favor. PP and Vox were absent from the vote under the pretext that the entity’s reform process was not stopped a month ago, on DANA day.
López received congressional endorsement in a second attempt, after failing to secure the two-thirds consensus of the House that the law envisions for the first vote. The government has in fact recently promoted a reform of the RTVE law to consolidate the reduction of parliamentary requirements necessary for the renewal of the body and facilitate the appointment of advisors and the president in the second round by absolute majority.
With the election of the new president, the government completes the renewal of the RTVE board of directors and puts an end to a long crisis which experienced its last episode a few months ago with the negotiation of the signature of David Broncano, with a conflict which resulted in successive resignations. and resignations from the governing body of the public entity. This mess ended the mandate of the former president, Elena Sánchez, as well as that of José Pablo López as content director of the channel, who now assumes command of the company.
López, as content director, had been the main promoter of the idea of bringing Broncano to Spanish television. The contract was eventually signed but it was done between tense negotiations that ended with his and the president’s departure and an interim period that has lasted until now.
To try to resolve this situation and given the blocking by the PP of negotiations for the renewal of RTVE, the Government, with its partners, promoted the new legal reform to allow the renewal of the management body with parliamentary majorities current, and allow the Executive and its partners to determine who constitutes the majority of the Council.
This reform increased the number of councilors so that eleven were elected by the Congress and four by the Senate (previously they elected six and four respectively), so that several members of the inauguration bloc were able to propose their own names for the body.
With the changes introduced by the government, the possibility for Congress to approve new advisers by absolute majority is protected in the event of a blockage preventing its approval by two-thirds of the House.
A formula, that of the absolute majority, which had already been used on previous occasions and which with this decree the Government wants to protect to avoid blockade situations like the one currently affecting the entity. Concretely, two previous decrees, one from 2017 and the other from 2022, had introduced changes so that in certain blockade situations and on a temporary basis, the Congress and the Senate could approve the election of members of the Council to the absolute majority. With this new modification, this double tower system is definitively fixed.
