The vote that saved the approval of the 2022 labor reform arrives this week before the Constitutional Court. The plenary session of the Guarantee Court analyzes on Tuesday the appeal that Alberto Casero, former PP deputy convicted of illegal awarding of contracts, presented against the decisions of Congress that prevented him from repeating and changing his vote in favor, essential to carry out one of the most relevant initiatives of the government in the last term. The Prosecutor’s Office requested the dismissal of his appeal in a case that began with the denunciation by the Popular Party of a conspiracy theory about the parliamentary televoting system and ended with Casero himself acknowledging that that day, at home, he made a mistake by pressing a button.
Later, it was learned that almost everything could have been different without Casero’s mistake. Yolanda Díaz, Minister of Labor, who was later promoted to vice president, assured a few months later that she was considering resigning if her flagship project failed in Congress. The PP leadership, with Pablo Casado at its head, hoped that the fall of this party would lead to the collapse of the government.
The Congress of Deputies voted on the labor reform on February 3, 2022. A marathon day in which the government closely observed each of the supports it needed to implement one of the most important laws of the legislature. With the investiture block broken for the vote and with the PP clearly installed in the negative, the PSOE and Unidas Podemos managed to gather the support of Ciudadanos, PdeCat, Más País, Compromís, Canarian Coalition, Teruel Exist, Nueva Canarias and the Cantabrian regionalists. But fear gripped the front rows of Parliament when the two deputies of Navarro’s Popular Union broke their party’s commitments and voted against.
Alberto Casero, PP deputy from Cáceres, voted electronically from his home in Madrid, where he was due to illness. And his vote, contrary to what his party and the entire Congress expected, was a “yes” to the government’s labor reform. An error that would not have gone beyond anecdote on a less busy day, but that marked the outcome of the parliamentary debate: the labor reform was approved with 175 votes in favor and 174 against. If Casero had not made a mistake, the numbers would have been reversed, the rule would not have been approved and the political landscape would have changed considerably.
The PP’s reaction to this error began with requests to the table and to the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, so that Casero could repeat and modify the vote, with allegations that even pointed to a computer error in the telematic voting application. The party, then led by Pablo Casado, abandoned this theory over the weeks but presented a battery of appeals against Batet’s decisions to prevent him from modifying his vote. Casero himself, over time, acknowledged in a Cadena SER podcast that he was wrong. In that vote and others, that day and the following days. Supporting, for example, that Congress investigate the government of his own party by the political police.
Two years later, labor reform has led to a sharp decline in temporary work, Alberto Casero has stepped away from politics after accepting a nearly two-year prison sentence for illegally awarding contracts while he was mayor of Trujillo, UPN lawmakers who violated electoral discipline hold different positions within the Popular Party, and the Constitutional Court is set to rule on whether the presidency of Congress acted correctly in preventing Casero from repeating his vote.
Four pending calls
There are four appeals awaiting decision by the plenary session of the Constitutional Court: two from the PP, another from Vox and that of Alberto Casero, who, according to judicial sources, will set the course for the rest. On Tuesday, the magistrates will analyze the allegations of the Extremadura politician with a debate centered on two points: what was the procedure for verifying electronic voting in force in the Congress of Deputies and also whether Batet should have authorized that, after voting remotely, I could have done it again in person.
All the appeals were presented against the decisions of the table and the presidency of the Lower House of the same day of February 2022, some extending their challenges to later confirmations by the same organizations. The sources of the case explain to elDiario.es that both the Prosecutor’s Office and the Congress of Deputies asked the plenary session to reject the appeal of the former parliamentarian of the Popular Party and to definitively approve one of the most controversial votes of the last decade.
Casero’s appeal raises the difference between the system implemented in 2012 by Congress for telematic voting and the one implemented after the pandemic. The first, resulting from a reform of the Rules of Procedure of the Lower House, provides that the presidency is obliged to call the deputy by telephone to verify “the effective conduct of the vote and its meaning.”
The outbreak of the pandemic has led to the arrival of a new system that includes a double check. Once the vote has been made, a second screen on the Parliament’s intranet asks the MP to check and confirm the direction of the vote before pressing “end vote” and making his decision final. Alberto Casero therefore said “yes” twice to the labor reform before realizing he had made a mistake and running for Congress to try to save the coalition government in one of its most delicate moments.
