The importance of the Senate in the next legislature

BarcelonaUsually, on election night, little attention is paid to the results in the Senate. But this time it seems it will be different. Both the left and the right have understood that control of the upper house could be key in a legislature that, whoever wins, is expected to be of high political voltage. For this reason, the PSOE and the Broad Front have rushed to agree on joint candidacies and now the PP and Vox, who no longer hide the intention to govern together, as did happen in 2023, are exploring forms of collaboration.

But why can the elections to the Senate be so important? Basically, there is the danger that a reinforced majority of 168 senators from the PP and Vox, combined with an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies, would allow these two parties to choose the four magistrates of the Constitutional Court that the upper house selects, and which were traditionally distributed between the majority parties, the PP and the PSOE. In this way, the conservatives would neutralize the current progressive majority and the left would be left without levers to stop possible laws, or interpretations of laws, that represent a setback in acquired civil rights.

But the danger of a conservative supermajority in Congress and the Senate goes much further. The PP and Vox would have the green light to storm the CGPJ and thus control the appointments of the main state courts, they would have a majority on the board of directors of RTVE and the rest of the public companies and, this is the most dangerous thing, they could even initiate minor changes to the Constitution. With a qualified majority, the PP and Vox would have a free hand even to apply Article 155 and intervene in the power of an annoying autonomous community, such as the Catalan one. Knowing the recentralizing plans and the spirit of revenge that the Spanish right has harbored over the last few years against Pedro Sánchez and his partners (among them, the Catalan sovereignists), it is not surprising that this time the Senate becomes an especially coveted piece.

Already during the current legislature, the PP has turned this chamber into its own private playground, emptying it of its original mission, which was to represent the territories, to turn it into a battering ram against Pedro Sánchez's government. The PP has used its current majority to delay the approval of laws or hinder legislative activity in general, and also to create numerous investigative commissions, always, however, in the same direction. With these precedents, it is evident that the PP and Vox will try to retain the majority in the Senate by all means to prevent the left, in the event of being evicted from power, from having any counterweight.

In short, on 29-N, it is not just the victory of the right or the left in Spain that is at stake, but, in the probable case that the former wins, as most polls indicate, what the scope of this victory is and what institutional power they accumulate to carry out their plans. In this battle, the vote in the Senate, therefore, will be one of the keys that will determine the limits of their power.