High Court maintains 14-F elections

BarcelonaThe parties had begun the electoral campaign with the uncertainty of whether they would finally end up voting on February 14. However, the doubts are over. The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has ruled on Friday that the 14-F is still in place after annulling the decree of suspension of the elections that the Government had made two weeks ago. Once they received the written statement of the Prosecutor (in favor of maintaining the elections), the seven members of the fifth section of the contentious-administrative chamber had already pledged to make a final decision by Friday. The sentence, according to judicial sources, will be communicated on Monday. Initially the magistrates had set February 8 as a deadline, but have ended up deciding beforehand.

On the table they had, on the one hand, the arguments of the Generalitat in favour of the postponement and, on the other hand, those of the parties that contest this decision. They also had, from Friday, the position of the Prosecutor's Office, which in its written statement was in favor of maintaining the elections on 14-F. "The current pandemic situation is the same as it was on the date of the initial call (December 21). The only new fact is that there has been a significant increase in infections due to the high volatility of the pandemic, a fact that was notoriously predictable at the time the elections were called", the Public Prosecutor's Office concluded.

The arguments put forward by the prosecution were of a diverse nature. Firstly, it recalled that there is no legal precept in either the electoral law or the Statute that provides for the suspension of elections. However, it neither existed for Galicia and the Basque Country, when they suspended them last year also due to the effect of the pandemic. The differences, according to the public ministry in the document delivered to the High Court, are basically two: in the other two examples, the electoral call was not the result of an automatism (on December 21, the Catalan legislature was dissolved because no replacement was found for the president quim Torra), but of the regional presidents' power to call early elections. The second difference is that then, the Prosecutor's Office recalls, the state of alarm involved "stricter" limitations on mobility than the ones that are in place today.

The "legal" insecurity that would be created by not knowing when the elections would be held was another argument for opposing the postponement. The Prosecutor's Office stressed that it is not possible to guarantee that a vote will be held on 30 May because, if it depends on the pandemic, it is not known whether the situation will then be better than it is today. Moreover, they insisted that the pandemic is new, but was already very present in December, when the legislature was brought to an end. To resolve the issue in the future, the Public Prosecutor's Office advocates reforming the Constitution or the necessary laws to provide for mechanisms that make it possible to vote more safely in the event of a pandemic or to include mechanisms to suspend elections.

The arguments of the Generalitat

In its appeal, the Generalitat asked for the elections to be postponed, citing as an example the situation in the United States after the elections that gave the victory to Joe Biden. "One day after the American elections there were 100,000 new cases of covid-19 in a single day", the lawyer of the Government recalls, despite the fact that, in principle, positive cases are not usually detected until a few days after contagion. In fact, two days before election day 100,000 new infections had also been detected.

According to the letter of the Generalitat, then, the case of the United States is a precedent that demonstrates that "there is a real and unacceptable risk of holding the elections on February 14 and that fifteen days later the number of infections, conventional and critical hospital admissions and the number of deaths increase exponentially". The Government also argued that the "fear" of contagion may cause many people to stay at home and not vote, and even warned that "the outcome of the elections that may be implemented may not have sufficient grounds to be legitimate" if because of the pandemic there are not enough "opportunities to deliberate and create an informed opinion" and the candidacies do not have "sufficient opportunities to present their programs and candidates".