The BNG wants salsa to start the political journey. The request to create a parliamentary commission of inquiry into pandemic contracts and the alleged overcharge of Álvaro Cunqueiro is a right that assists it, under the regulations of the Autonomous Chamber. When the prerogative is exercised, no one questions the motivation, it is enough to activate the mechanism and it sets in motion. In other words, it turns out that the opposition has weapons to control. Now, are commissions of inquiry useful for anything in an autonomous parliament? Experience shows that, at least in Galicia, no. They open and close, sometimes without conclusions, sometimes against the criteria of the group that presided over their creation. Even today, the opinion of the commission created to investigate the collapse of the Galician financial system, with the bankruptcy of the old savings banks, has still not been approved. It disappeared with the dissolution of Parliament in December and this legislature was not even created. Does anyone remember what was said? We remember and remember the farce of the Prestige Commission, the day after Fraguism, with connotations as Guadian as they were absurd: if an investigative body already existed in Congress, what was the point of opening it in Galicia, with less capacity for convening and influence? Or those that the bipartisan opened against the PP during its phase, due to the additional costs of the City of Culture and the collapse of some pipes on the Salnés road. In the first, Manuel Fraga, an octogenarian, appears in a kind of posthumous lynching by the government majority of the time. Neither prevented the victory of Núñez Feijóo in 2009, which also proved the misfortunes of that other commission of the PSOE electoral agent, whose conclusions were accepted by the socialists and the nationalists so that there would be no victims. The scandal had been discovered by the PP, but the PSOE and the BNG buried it because they had the same control over its operation that the popular will now display. There were more, eh. Another one was opened because of the accident of O Marisquiño, which the PSOE had planted but which Abel Caballero was proud to attend, as if the accident had not happened in Vigo. He finished his work plan, languished, withered and died, without conclusions. Almost like the other one that the opposition organized on the health situation in 2018, from which it withdrew because the PP did not allow it to convene more than a hundred participants, as it had planned, and created an alternative forum that Miguel Santalices ended up closing its doors for using Parliament in an inadmissible way. The conclusions of the investigation committees are not established in the headquarters of Parliament, but in the reports of the different political parties. Given the polarization that society is going through – and from which Galicia is not immune -, left-wing and nationalist voters will firmly believe that there was a plot to enrich the Cunqueiro dealer, the company of Ayuso’s boyfriend and the multinational in which Feijóo’s sister works. And it does not matter if the opposite is said or proven, because coffee producers need caffeine. PP supporters, for their part, will argue that all this is part of a desperate strategy by the opposition to have something to say after the setback in the regional elections. So, what card should you keep if you are neutral? Given that the commissions of inquiry are nothing like those in American films and series, the place where criminal offences are resolved are the courts. A judge is not denied documents or an invitation to testify, and in a trial, a witness has the obligation to answer what is asked of him. Justice is always respected, unless of course it is investigating the wife of the President of the Government. So, if someone expects this commission to release a bomb whose political and electoral effects will be perceptible and will change the current order of things, that would be good. It is better to make them understand that this – most likely – instead of elaborate pyrotechnics, could well end up being simple firecrackers, which make noise one moment and are forgotten the next.
Commissions of Inquiry: Bombs or Firecrackers?
RELATED ARTICLES