Montero boasts that no government law has been rejected after 35 defeats in Congress

When this Tuesday, the PSOE spokesperson in Congress, Patxi López, proudly declared that the government had not lost the vote on any law or decree during this legislature, his words seemed to be the result of a slip of the tongue, a slip of the tongue. But this Wednesday, to everyone’s surprise, the First Vice-President of the Executive and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, defended in the control session of the Lower House that, in effect, Parliament had approved “all the laws” that it had presented to her the Council of Ministers.

The statement, to say the least, is biased. First, because the government has considerably reduced the number of bills and royal decrees that it submits to Congress. To continue, because in January, during the debate on the first three royal decrees-laws that it submitted for validation, the Lower House overturned one of them. Perhaps Mr. López does not say it because it comes from the Ministry of Labor, in the hands of Sumar and not from the PSOE. And finally, because the Executive is playing a double trick: transmitting in the form of bills, through the parliamentary groups, standards that would normally come from the Council of Ministers in the form of projects and, on the other hand, withdrawing at the last minute the votes that were lost.

The latter case occurred, for example, with the land bill, which the executive withdrew a few hours before its debate, aware that it would lose the vote. It also happened this Tuesday, although it is not a norm in itself, with the debate on the trajectory of the deficit. In fact, if this movement is considered a defeat, it is the fourth time that Parliament has rejected the stability objective – a preliminary step to the general state budgets – proposed by the government. The first two, due to separate vetoes by the Senate – the investiture majority modified the law to bypass the necessary approval of the Upper House – and the third in July, when the PP, Vox and Junts voted against the Treasury proposal in Congress.

[EN AMPLIACIÓN]