The president of the Balearic Parliament, Gabriel Le Senne (Vox), is considering the possibility of permanently excluding from the Council of the Chamber the socialist deputies Mercedes Garrido and Pilar Costa, whom the far-right parliamentarian ordered this Tuesday to leave the Chamber because of their refusal to change the t-shirts they wore with the portrait of Aurora Picornell, icon of republicanism in Majorca, and two others shot dead by the Franco regime. Le Senne considers that the events that occurred during the plenary session were “extraordinarily serious”.
In statements to the media before the meeting of spokespersons held this Wednesday, the second authority of the Balearic Islands stated that “education and respect for the institution and positions cannot be lost”, affirming that “until ‘at 12 times’ he cut the microphone of one of the deputies and she opened it again.
In this sense, the president relies on article 88 of the Rules of Procedure of Parliament, which provides that when members of the Council want to intervene in the debate, they must leave the Council and go down to a single seat. “I interpret, with the support of the legal services, that this results in a duty of neutrality for the Council,” he underlined. In this regard, he stressed that “it is another question whether they can be called to order for failure to fulfill this duty”, stressing that he called them to order because of “the disorder that this attitude generates in the plenary session.
The episode occurred at a time when the amendment of all left-wing groups to repeal the Balearic Democratic Memory Law, the removal of which Vox promoted, was about to begin to be debated, and four months after Le Senne drew the same portrait of those called “Red Molinar”, whose photo Garrido displayed on the cover of his computer. The House’s top representative urged the two socialists to replace their clothes in order to safeguard the neutrality of the Council or to take their seats in the chamber if they preferred to continue wearing them.
However, faced with the persistence of both to continue to wear the jersey, in a climate of maximum tension and after three regulatory calls to order, the president finally ordered their expulsion.
After the Table meeting held this Wednesday, the PSIB-PSOE highlighted the possibility that Le Senne proposes the definitive expulsion of Garrido and Costa de la Mesa through a letter of dismissal, similar to that presented by the opposition groups (PSIB- PSOE, Més per Mallorca, Més per Menorca and Podemos) to remove the parliamentarian from Vox following the tearing of Picornell’s portrait. The proposal did not succeed due to the abstention of the PP, which facilitated the continuity of the far-right leader.
In the case of Garrido and Costa, Vox would need a “yes” from the popular party, given that a three-fifths majority of the Chamber (36 of the chamber’s 59 deputies) is essential for the initiative to prosper. The debate would also take place in the middle of negotiations on the spending ceiling for the 2025 budgets: those of Santiago Abascal have not yet specified whether they would support the figures proposed by the PP and warn that their vote “is not free”.
In this sense, the training put on the table three “fundamental” premises for negotiating the regional accounts: the revision of the Vox measures paralyzed or repealed after the breakdown of governance agreements with the PP, an “explicit rejection of the regulations and policies of distribution of illegal immigrants” and “concrete plans” in response to the distribution of migrants.
The PSIB-PSOE, for its part, showed itself ready to abstain from the spending ceiling if the PP stops the repeal of the Democratic Memory Law, a proposal that was part of the governability agreement that the two parties signed at the start of the legislature. to support the popular Marga Prohens as president of the Balearic government. Both parties agreed to “guarantee memory understood as an integrating element of reconciliation, combating any attempt by those who try to use it to divide the Spaniards”, which was interpreted as an attack on historical memory, understood wrongly by those of Santiago Abascal as an attempt to “divide the Spaniards” instead of interpreting it as a tool to repair the wounds of the Franco dictatorship and the civil war.
