Maintains the format of the 2019 elections: 70 deputies and regional and island constituencies
SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 27 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The plenary session of the Parliament of the Canary Islands has unanimously approved this Wednesday the presentation report of the proposal for the Elections Law to the Parliament of the Canary Islands.
The president, Gustavo Matos, has assessed that the mandate of the Statute is being complied with, although with some “delay” due to the “peculiarities” of the Legislature, marked by the state of alarm and the evolution of the pandemic.
He pointed out that this new norm gives more “legal certainty” to the electoral processes of the islands and stressed that the political groups have “come up to the task” for carrying out a law that is an “important step”.
This electoral law incorporates different provisions that already governed the regional electoral process of May 2019 and that, despite not being provided for in the electoral law of 2003, were essential to order that last appointment with the polls with criteria of operability and security legal, following the criteria of the Electoral Board of the Canary Islands and the Advisory Council.
The new law, structured in six titles, consists of forty articles, a transitory disposition, a repeal and three final ones.
From what is established in the text, it stands out that the total number of seats to be elected will be 70, the establishment of a regional constituency and seven insular constituencies.
The autonomous constituency will be elected nine seats and the total of the island constituencies will be elected sixty-one seats, which will be distributed as follows: three for El Hierro, eight for Fuerteventura, 15 for Gran Canaria, four for La Gomera, eight for Lanzarote, eight for La Palma and 15 for Tenerife.
Voting will be done through two ballots, one for each type of constituency, island or regional, and each of these ballots will be placed in a different ballot box.
NECESSARY LEGAL SECURITY
After taking it into consideration last November, the president, Gustavo Matos, transferred the commitment of the Chamber to approve the law before the end of the current period of sessions and for this the Presidency of Parliament commissioned the General Secretariat to draft a text of law proposal with the incorporation of the technical-legal criteria with which the elections were held in 2019.
That draft was passed on to the Table and the parliamentary groups, which expressed their agreement with the approval of the law in those terms, without prejudice to the fact that each one would continue, in the future, maintaining their opinion on some aspects of the electoral system.
Thus, some technical amendments were presented that were incorporated into the text of the report and the groups showed their agreement in the processing of the law by the abbreviated procedure, collects a note from the Chamber.
The deputies Rosa Bella Cabrera and Ventura del Carmen Rodríguez for the Socialist Group participated in the presentation that has carried out these works; José Miguel Barragán and Socorro Beato for the Canarian Nationalist Group; Australia Navarro and Luz Reverón from the Popular Group; Luis Campos from the Nueva Canarias Group; Manuel Marrero from the Grupo Sí Podemos Canarias; Melodie Mendoza and Jesús Ramón Ramos from the Gomera Socialist Association Group; Ricardo Fernández de la Puente for the Mixed Group.
The First Transitory Provision of the new Statute of Autonomy, in force since the end of 2018, requires, in its article 39, the approval of an electoral law for the Canary Islands within a period of three years.
In May 2019, the citizens of the Canary Islands voted in the regional elections with a new system, but still without that law approved this Wednesday and whose objective is to guarantee the necessary legal certainty for the following regional elections.
