2026 begins with new appointments at Catalan companies, including two familiar faces from Spanish politics. Former minister and former Speaker of the Congress Meritxell Batet joins the board of Sateliot, and former regional minister Àngels Chacón will head LLYC's Barcelona office. AstraZeneca's subsidiary in Spain and Iberia also starts the year with the appointment of female executives.

Interestingly, this week the telecoms sector has been looking to politics. On the one hand, Telefónica has appointed former PNV president Andoni Ortuzar to its board of directors. A controversial appointment, given that it comes amidst negotiations for a workforce reduction plan. On the other hand, Sateliot approached the socialist Meritxell Batet, president of the Congress of Deputies between 2019 and 2023, formerly Minister of Public Administration (2018-2019), and currently president of the National Council of the PSC (Socialist Party of Catalonia). In addition, the Eurogroup has a new president, and Oriol Oró is stepping down as director of Fira de Lleida after 18 years. These are the most notable appointments of the week:

The labour law reform has been approved in Parliament with an added touch of poetry and confusion. In fact, the Bureau is studying an PP MP's vote to establish whether an error occurred during the count. Topping the intrigue of the last few days, during the vote all alarms went off. Speaker Meritxell Batet announced that the decree had been repealed, despite announcing a very tight vote of 175 votes in favour to 174 against. The faces of president Pedro Sánchez and vice-presidents Nadia Calviño and Yolanda Díaz were an absolute sight. The right-wing benches celebrated, but moments later Batet corrected herself: "The chamber's services inform me that the royal decree is validated". The session was adjourned with shouts of "it's been rigged!" from the right-wing bench.

After the clash between the Supreme Court and Parliament over the conviction of Podemos MP Alberto Rodríguez, the president of the chamber, Meritxell Batet, has ended up deciding to leave Rodríguez without a seat. She has done so after the request by the president of the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court, Manuel Marchena, who this morning answered in writing in the clarification Batet asked him on Thursday on how the sentence ought to be executed and whether the fact of having received suspended prison sentence also affected his disqualification. Marchena has been categorical stating that "the validity" of the disqualification was maintained and recalled that it is mandatory, according to article 56 of the Penal Code.

This week an unprecedented event has taken place in the Spanish Constitutional Court. A conservative magistrate has decided to withdraw his own opinion to prevent it from being backed by his colleagues. He had only obtained the votes of the progressive magistrates and, therefore, it would cause a defeat of his colleagues on the right. As Ernesto Ekaizer explains, it is a new episode that shows to what extent the People's Party and Vox control the main organs of the judiciary and are succeeding in getting the right and the far right to impose their ideology over the parliamentary majority.

The imminent defeat of the conservative majority in the Constitutional Court over Vox's appeal for protection against the Congressional bureau last Wednesday has led the rapporteur, Judge Antonio Narváez, who had proposed rejecting it, to reconsider his project and join his other five colleagues to form a majority in favour of the ruling. For this reason, the ruling on the appeal, according to sources consulted by ARA, has been postponed until the plenary session next October, which will also deal with the appeal by the ultra-right-wing party against the extension of the state of alarm for six months, after the declaration of unconstitutionality of the first lockdown last July.