The Senate Bureau has decided to incorporate into the agenda of this Wednesday's Plenary Session the decision on whether to process directly and in a single reading the reform of the Spanish Constitution promoted by the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, which modifies article 69.3 so that the island of Formentera has its own senator and ceases to be part of the electoral tandem that it currently shares with Ibiza.
The content of this constitutional amendment for Formentera to have its own representative in the Upper House will be submitted for debate and vote in upcoming sessions, but first the procedure must be resolved, as it has been requested that it be processed in a single reading, without a report phase or passage through committee.
The definitive support of the PP was unblocked in Congress after the PSOE facilitated the approval of an amendment to this reform so that in the constitutional text the denomination Ibiza in Castilian is maintained and not that of Eivissa which the Balearic Parliament proposed.
In any case, the Parliament of the Balearic Islands had already unsuccessfully tried in three previous legislatures for the Cortes Generales to give the green light to this reform of the Constitution, although now both Chambers have accelerated the deadlines and foresee its approval shortly.
Currently, Formentera and Ibiza share a single electoral constituency to elect their representative in the Senate, a seat that in this legislature is occupied by Juanjo Ferrer, who ran in the last elections in a joint candidacy of PSOE, Sumar, EUIB and Ara Eivissa.
Model similar to that of the Canary Islands
The initiative of the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, which will foreseeably go ahead, proposes that section 3 of article 69 of the Spanish Constitution expressly states that one senator corresponds to the following islands: Ibiza, Formentera, Menorca, Fuerteventura, La Gomera, El Hierro, Lanzarote and La Palma.
The text also adds a single additional provision so that the effectiveness of the creation of the electoral constituency for the Senate for the island of Formentera "will be delayed" until the immediate elections to the Upper House that are held once this reform of the Spanish Constitution has entered into force.
In the statement of reasons, the Balearic Parliament maintains that this modification of the Magna Carta seeks that "be recognized" effectively in the Senate "the territorial, geographical and existential singularities of all the territories that make up Spain, in all their plurality and constitutive diversity".
Likewise, it underlines the central role of the islands for a decision of this type "to be considered a good constitutional reform", felt "as its own and beloved, within the Balearic archipelago itself (in full equality with the Canarian one) and, by extension, in the whole of Spain".
A reform limited to the Formentera case
As usually happens before any proposal for constitutional modification, several groups tried to take advantage of the occasion to introduce amendments on unrelated issues, but Congress opted to limit this initiative to the matter of Formentera.
In this regard, the Congress Bureau rejected the admission for processing of the amendment registered by Navarrese People's Union (UPN) considering that it did not have a connection with the object of this bill. The Navarrese regionalists intended to suppress the fourth transitional provision of the Constitution, which establishes the specific procedure for an eventual incorporation of Navarre into the autonomous regime of the Basque Country.
The same criterion was used for the eleven amendments presented by the PNV to this specific reform of the Constitution, which proposed far-reaching changes such as modifying article 2 on the unity of Spain, recognizing the right to self-determination, limiting the inviolability of the King and repealing article 155, which allows the Government to intervene in autonomous communities.