Santander (EFE)
After the 28M elections, the Cantabrian Parliament is constituted in its eleventh legislature by 15 deputies from the PP, 8 from the PRC, 8 from the PSOE and 4 from Vox.
González Revuelta will exercise the Presidency of the Chamber after obtaining 18 supports, compared to the 16 that the regionalist Javier López Marcano, proposed by the PRC with the support of the PSOE, has obtained.
The remaining vote was null because one of the parliamentarians who took office this afternoon wrote María José Sáenz de Buruaga, who is the leader of the PP and future president of Cantabria, on her ballot, instead of María José González Revuelta.
The constitutive session, which started at 5:00 p.m., was initially chaired by the Senior Board made up of the oldest deputy, Miguel Ángel Revilla (PRC), and the two youngest, the popular Miguel Ángel Vargas and Álvaro aguirre.
In the session, the 35 deputies -17 of them new-, of which 19 are men and 16 women, have taken office.
As an anecdote, to the traditional “I swear or promise to abide by the Constitution and the Statute of Autonomy for Cantabria and hold the position of deputy in defense of the interests of Cantabria” that all parliamentarians must read when the Chamber is constituted, those of Vox have added to the final “and of Spain”.
The distribution of the table
In addition, the members of the Board have been elected, made up of the popular Juan José Alonso Venero as first vice president; the regionalist Javier López Marcano as second vice president; Armando Blanco, from Vox, as first secretary; and the socialist Joaquín Gómez, who in the previous legislature presided over the Chamber, will be second secretary.
In the same way that Vox has supported González Revuelta for the Presidency, the PP has given its votes in the election of the secretariats to Vox, the least represented party in the Chamber, to the detriment of the PSOE, which aspired to that position.
Dialogue and openness
In her first words as president of Parliament, González Revuelta thanked the Chamber, her parliamentary group and the president of the PP for their support and had words of remembrance to her nine predecessors and also to her colleagues at the Bureau in the previous legislature, in which she was second vice president.
González Revuelta has announced that this Friday the round of contacts with the parliamentary groups will begin to propose the candidate for the Presidency of the autonomous community.
The objective, he said, is to set “as soon as possible” the investiture session that will make María José Sáenz de Buruaga (PP) the first president of Cantabria, whom he has thanked for his “generosity and trust.”
The popular has promised to exercise the Presidency of the Chamber in accordance with “the best values of parliamentarism”, promoting political dialogue and the opening of the Chamber to all of society.
“The citizens of Cantabria await with great interest the opening of a new period of our autonomy and Parliament is now where this event has to take place with guarantees and due solemnity”, he added.
Group reactions
The acting president of Cantabria and leader of the PRC, Miguel Ángel Revilla, has predicted that PP and Vox will end up ruling together in Cantabria after July 23 if the two parties have a majority, and has lamented that “there has been no way” to achieve the “plural and without vetoes” agreement that the regionalists defended, according to the electoral result.
“We are not going to prevent the PP candidate from being sworn in as President of the Government, but we have already been able to intuit that there is a more or less covert pact between PP and Vox,” Revilla said.
The general secretary of the Socialists of Cantabria, Pablo Zuloaga, has lamented “the obvious” PP-Vox agreement for the election of the Parliamentary Bureau.
“We have experienced a circus and a dramatization in recent weeks with these supposed rapprochements between the PP and PRC, when in reality it is clear that the PP prefers Vox and that is how the president of the Parliament of Cantabria has been elected,” Zuloaga opined.
Vox has defended that whenever there have been four parliamentary groups in the chamber they have been “logically” represented at the Table.
“It is a basic norm of parliamentary courtesy and the equivalent of plurality, which is the best when we talk about exercising politics,” added Leticia Díaz (Vox), who also stressed that there was “neither cheating nor cardboard” in voting to elect its members.
Íñigo Fernández (PP) has celebrated that the Table is “plural” and, although he regrets that an agreement has not been reached for its configuration, he believes that they will be years “of much dialogue and negotiation.”
“Thanks to the fact that we opened dialogue, conversations and we worked on an agreement, the PSOE and Vox have a representative that they would not have had otherwise,” he added.