The Prosecutor’s Office gives air to Alberto Rodríguez in his battle to regain his seat in Congress

The decision of the Public Ministry, known late on Monday through the newspaper The world, responds to one of the two appeals filed by Rodríguez before the Constitutional Court in his legal battle to recover his seat, which he previously unsuccessfully brought before the Central Electoral Board and before the Supreme Court itself. In that text, the former deputy of United We Can, who now plans to embark on a new political project, considered that Batet’s decision to suspend him had violated his right to remain in the exercise of representative public office through a measure that should have corresponded to the Plenary of Congress and not its president. He also maintained that Batet’s gesture was not sufficiently motivated and that the consequence of the loss of the condition of deputy involved double punishment and was a disproportionate consequence derived from the criminal sanction.

In the brief, Rodríguez’s defense, exercised by lawyers Isabel Elbal and Gonzalo Boye, asks the Constitutional Court to return the seat to him, and denounces that withdrawing the act was “a unilateral, unfounded and, therefore, arbitrary decision” of the president of Congress. Batet is accused of having “vulnerated” up to seven fundamental rights of Rodríguez, as well as those of the 64,000 Canarian voters who elected him as deputy for Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The lawyers also maintain that the president of Congress “invented a cause, not provided for in the Law, to deprive Rodríguez of her seat.”

The text also considers that the president of Congress, “as a jurist, she should have known” that when a prison sentence is replaced by a fine “the prison sentence is definitively and irreversibly substituted”, for which “there is no base type” to remove the seat. “The fine was paid immediately by my principal, with which the execution of this was exhausted there,” adds the resource. The penalty, therefore, “was extinguished immediately by the payment of the fine, which is what replaced the penalty; from then on, it would not even be possible to talk about the duration of this for the purposes of the accessory of ‘special disqualification for the right to passive suffrage during the time of the sentence’”.

The prosecutor now considers in the report that he has sent to the Constitutional Court that the agreement adopted by Batet incurs a “double automatism” and that there may be “margin” for another understanding of the law, a thesis that, if accepted by the court, could mean the restitution of Rodríguez’s seat, which has been empty for nine months.

A questioned sentence that confronted the Supreme Court and Batet

Last October, the interpretation of the sentence provoked an unprecedented clash between the Supreme Court and the Presidency of Congress. Jurists of all sensitivities had questioned not only the sentence, which had several individual votes and was based fundamentally on the testimony of the allegedly assaulted agent, but also its consequences. Several legal experts have maintained throughout this time that it would have been enough to remove the parliamentarian for a month and a half without removing his seat definitively.

The lawyers of the Congress themselves initially assured in a report dated October 18 that Rodríguez could keep the seat, considering that the deprivation of the right to passive suffrage dictated by the High Court in the sentence does not affect the condition of deputy, which was previously acquired. Two days later, however, the Supreme Court issued an ambiguous report calling for the suspension. In between, the Rodríguez case became a throwing weapon in the political battle that was staged in two tense meetings of the Mesa, the Chamber’s governing body. While the right-wing minority of PP and Vox defended that the former leader of Podemos should be suspended, the majority of PSOE and United We Can claimed his permanence based on that letter from the lawyers.

It was at the second meeting of the highest body of the Lower House to address the case, that of October 21, in which the president of Congress was more favorable to withdrawing the minutes as a result of pressure from both the Supreme Court and the rights . But given the doubts expressed by the lawyers, Batet promoted a vote in which the majority of PSOE and United We Can agreed to request more explanations from the Supreme Court. A day later and after receiving another letter from the High Court reminding him that Rodríguez had been sentenced to prison and disqualification from passive suffrage and, after consulting the secretary general of Congress and senior lawyer, Batet decided to withdraw his seat.

That same night, United We Can sent a brief statement to the press announcing that they would file a complaint for prevarication against Batet. That announcement of the complaint caused an internal schism in the confederal formation since both the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, and the Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, and even Rodríguez himself were unaware of the decision, who the following day decided to from Podemos and start his own legal battle to regain the seat, as well as his own political career outside his former party.

The senior lawyer of Congress endorsed in writing Batet’s decision to suspend the former deputy from the confederal formation, but criticism from everyone – except the PSOE – against the president of the Lower House multiplied and Podemos formally requested his resignation. The president’s entourage explained then that in everything related to Rodríguez’s conviction she had maintained an “institutional position” following “the procedure quickly” and always listening to the legal services of the Chamber, as well as that Rodríguez’s case is a matter “strictly technical legal” and “is not a problem of a political nature.” The former parliamentarian also decided to approach his defense from the legal point of view, hiring Elbal and Boye as lawyers.

A new project “of Canarian obedience

Alberto Rodriguez intends to return to politics although far from the formation that is now directed by the Minister of Social Rights, Ione Belarra. In June, the former deputy announced his willingness to compete in the 2023 elections in a political project “of Canarian obedience.” “If there is a space for popular Canarian obedience to improve the material living conditions of people in 2023, they will be able to count on my help, in whatever position is necessary,” he specified last month. Rodríguez expressed the need to have a formation whose structure is located in the Canary Islands and argued that the parties based outside the Archipelago – without expressly mentioning Podemos or United We Can – will always be more interested in what happens in one of the great capitals than for a theme of the Canary Islands.

The withdrawal of the seat and the differences between Rodríguez and what was his party continue to have consequences not only for United We Can but also for the coalition government in a Congress of Deputies in which it does not have an absolute majority and each seat is essential to remove forward your proposals. Nine months after his expulsion from Congress, the confederal group has not managed to replace Alberto Rodríguez’s seat due to discrepancies between the state leadership of Podemos and that of the Canary Islands, where he is the former deputy. There is also the circumstance that, last March, United We Can was left without another seat due to the decision of another Canarian deputy, Meri Pita, to move to the Mixed Group due to differences with the leadership.

All in all, the confederal group has 33 of the 35 seats it won in the elections, so the sum with the PSOE reaches 153 seats and not the initial 155, which forces the Executive to intensify contacts in search of support between their usual partners and, sometimes, outside of them.

Consulted by this newspaper, the leadership of Podemos has avoided commenting on the new milestone that is the report of the Prosecutor’s Office that protects Rodríguez, known this week. But the party reiterates that the situation to which the political force has been led is the responsibility of the president of the Lower House, Meritxell Batet.

Pablo Echenique, spokesperson for United We Can in Congress, has always pointed out that “the seat was stolen from an elected deputy by a sentence, first, unfair and without evidence, because he never committed the crime he is said to have committed, and also in that sentence did not state that the minutes had to be taken away from him.” “However, the Presidency of the Congress of Deputies and Mr. [presidente de la Sala Segunda del Tribunal Supremo, Manuel] Marchena decided to take away his seat. This is very serious”, he denounced in March, in an interview in elDiario.es. “The responsibility for missing a seat and that, for example, the labor reform went ahead because a PP deputy made a mistake, belongs to Meritxell Batet and Marchena, not to United We Can,” he remarked.

The confederal group avoids talking about the differences with Podemos Canarias and insists that it is “working humbly” to try to restore that seat, but, at the same time, insists that it has not forgotten “who has taken it from the progressive majority”, alluding, again, to Batet.