Back to normal in Canary Parliament. After almost two years in which face-to-face attendance at plenary sessions has been reduced due to the pandemic, the 70 Canarian deputies that make up the regional Chamber return to their seats today. The remission of the health crisis allows the Parliament to recover its capacity to 100%, after the level 1 measures for the reduction of infections have begun to be applied in Tenerife.
The plenary session held today will be the first in which the entire plenary hall can be seen again, after in March 2020 the emergency caused by the covid forced the articulation of formulas that would allow the legislative activity of the Chamber to continue without compromising health security. The situation at that time made it difficult for deputies from other islands to move to Tenerife and the need to maintain social distancing prevented the presence of the 70 deputies in the plenary hall. For this reason, an express reform of the Chamber’s regulations had to be carried out to allow participation and telematic voting.
Congress and the Senate have been allowing voting assistance for several months
Throughout these almost 24 months, only twenty deputies attended the plenary session in person along with three members of the Government. The other positions of the Executive had to follow the session in the Europa room, as well as the rest of the deputies who physically attended. Those who had to intervene moved to the plenary hall to return to the Europa room at the end. Meanwhile, another part of the deputies could connect virtually and vote electronically.
The president of Parliament, Gustavo Matos, explained yesterday that the recovery of the capacity to 100% implies “the obligation to attend the session in person”, in such a way that the Europa room, which until now also fulfilled functions of a plenary hall to increase the physical presence in the Chamber during plenary sessions, will not provide this service while the situation continues.
Matos insisted that the new scenario decreases “the possibility of telematic presence, intervention and voting, formula enabled in 2020 thanks to regulatory adaptation and a technological boost carried out in record time. These measures allowed the activity of the regional Parliament not to be paralyzed during the pandemic and that the Chamber has not closed a single day since the start of the health crisis, as Matos recalled.
The return of all the deputies to their seats brings with it some redistribution of parliamentarians. This is the case of Vidina Espino, elected in 2019 as a deputy for Ciudadanos (Cs) who left the formation in July of last year. The deputy expressed her disagreement in recent days because in the new distribution of the plenary hall she returned to occupy seat 55, together with her former party colleague Ricardo Fernández de la Puente, instead of 54, which she has been occupying for more than a year and which is closer to the nationalist caucus. A change that she said she was trying to avoid the image of her integrated into the CC-PNC group, after Espino announced last week that she will collaborate with the Canarian Coalition, although she will not join the party.
Matos warns that the increase in capacity implies the obligation to attend in person
Finally, after her request, the deputy will be able to sit next to the nationalist parliamentarians in which the seat of the Mixed group has been in these almost two years of pandemic.
The Canarian Parliament today inaugurates normality in plenary but It is not one of the first chambers of representation to recover total presence in the sessions. At the national level, both the Congress of Deputies and the Senate recovered 100% capacity several months ago. The Upper House agreed in September the return of all the senators, while the Congress allows since last October, after 19 months of limitations, the presence of all the deputies in the votes of the hemicycle, although in the rest of the session and other acts the capacity is reduced to 75%.
A measure that was demanded for weeks by several of the opposition parties, such as the Popular Party (PP) or Vox, which They criticized that while most companies had already returned to normal, Congress continued to function partially virtually. Something that some considered could serve many parliamentarians, especially those who reside in communities other than Madrid, to be absent from the capital despite having called sessions in Congress.
However, in December with the advance of the sixth wave due to the appearance of the omicron variant, the Congress returned to the telematic vote also to give the possibility of participating to those deputies who were infected, as well as to reduce the risk of spreading the virus in the institution.
Something similar has happened in the regional parliaments, which, like the Canary Islands, had to find ways to adapt the holding of plenary sessions to the new conditions after the appearance of the pandemic.. After working for months with a part of their representatives connected virtually, some have already been working normally for several months and with the plenary halls filled to the brim. This is the case of the Parliament of Galicia, which has allowed all deputies to attend since September, while others such as the Andalusian have done so since last December.
