One of the most bizarre sessions ever held in the Spanish Senate has been called for this Thursday: a debate on the amnesty in the General Committee for the Autonomous Communities. There could not be a more surprising forum: this committee in the Senate is for debate on problems or disputes between autonomous communities, and the amnesty, no matter how you look at it, from one side or another, has nothing to do with its functions. It is obvious, therefore, that it is not meeting to talk about something that does not concern it, but rather, it has a clearly different purpose: to use the upper house as a loudspeaker for a legislative initiative yet to be born and thus erode the political initiative. Since the People's Party (PP) has an absolute majority in this chamber, it has deployed the upper house's resources at will to implement an initiative that was going to end up decaffeinated, politically speaking, when the Pedro Sánchez government, the Basque lehendakari and the presidents of those autonomous communities which are Socialist-run withdrew from the debate.
That was how it was going to be until on Tuesday the Catalan government announced that the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, would go to the Senate committee, since the Republican Left (ERC) leader was not willing to leave any chair empty with regard to fundamental issues, such as the end of the repression against Catalonia or the amnesty for those prosecuted over independence process actions. An explanation that this Wednesday was complemented by the information that Aragonès was to make his ten-minute speech and then leave the committee to continue with his planned agenda in the Spanish capital. Favouring the possibility that the presence of the Catalan president in the Senate might be forgotten as soon as it is over is the fact that the speaking order of of the regional presidents will comply with the established protocol set according to the date of approval of their respective Statutes of Autonomy. Catalonia would thus be the second to take the floor after the Basque Country, but in the absence of a representative of the latter, Aragonès will have the right to the first speech by a president.
Aragonès thus will not leave the chair empty, but he won't be able to warm it up either, because he will not have time. If his initial decision to attend was surprising to many, since it meant acquiescing to an event that indisputably has a strong electoralist smell, it also appealed to the PP because it left Urkullu and the Socialists looking like intolerant politicians. In his second dodge, the Catalan president has irritated the PP, which will refute the positions of Aragonès and the independence movement, also of the Socialists, the true targets for the PP's barbs, in a forum where only PP presidents will remain. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who is betting everything on the card of a hypothetical repeat election, has positioned the amnesty as the frontispiece of a new election on January 14th, having already announced that if that vote is held, he will try to turn it into a Spain-wide referendum on the amnesty for Catalan independentists facing prosecution for political actions they carried out during the independence procés.
If we talk about the underlying issue, it is truly surreal that the General Committee for the Autonomous Communities is to meet to talk about an amnesty that does not exist and that is not its responsibility to address. You only need to go to the reasons for the creation of this committee in the Senate in 1994 to verify it: its objective, as a territorial chamber, is to make itself familiar with all matters related to the autonomous state. It would take infinite imagination to want to know the opinion of the regional presidents on a matter that logically will not affect either the powers they have, nor the agreements between them on cooperation, nor their autonomous community financing, nor the transfers of competencies. But well, when you are looking for noise, any place is good, the PP must think. And so, the Senate that is of no use will continue to be of no use.