The Congress has given this Thursday its approval to the reform of the Spanish Constitution promoted by the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, which amends article 69.3 so that the island of Formentera has its own senator and ceases to be linked in the same electoral “tandem” that it now shares with Ibiza.
In the vote, only Vox has positioned itself against this modification of the Magna Carta related to Formentera. The text is now sent to the Senate for its definitive ratification and subsequent publication in the Official State Gazette (BOE). UPN and four ERC deputies have opted for abstention.
The final support of the PP was unblocked after the PSOE accepted to incorporate an amendment to the reform, so that the denomination Ibiza in Castilian is maintained in the Constitution and not that of Eivissa, just as the Balearic Parliament had initially proposed.
The Parliament of the Balearic Islands had already tried unsuccessfully in three previous legislatures for the Cortes Generales to pass this reform. On this occasion, the processing in Congress has accelerated and the modification has been approved in approximately one month.
Currently, Formentera and Ibiza form a single electoral constituency for the Senate. The seat that corresponds to them is occupied in this legislature by Juanjo Ferrer, elected in the last elections with the joint candidacy of PSOE, Sumar, EUIB and Ara Eivissa.
Reform of article 69.3 and entry into force
The proposal of the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, finally approved, consisted of the section 3 of article 69 of the Constitution incorporating 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 new electoral constituency to the Senate for the island of Formentera “will be delayed” until the next elections to the Upper House that are held once this constitutional reform has entered into force.
In the statement of reasons, the Balearic Parliament argues that with this modification it is intended that “the territorial, geographical and existential singularities of all the territories that make up Spain, in all its plurality and constitutive diversity” be effectively “recognized” in the Senate.
Likewise, the role of the islands is highlighted so that a decision of this type “is 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”.
Limited scope of the reform and discarded amendments
As usually happens when the door is opened to a constitutional reform, different groups took the opportunity to register amendments on other matters, but the Lower House has opted to circumscribe the initiative exclusively to the case of Formentera.
Along these lines, the Bureau of the Congress rejected admitting for processing the amendment by Unión del Pueblo Navarro (UPN) considering that it was not related to the content of the bill. The Navarrese regionalists proposed suppressing 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 applied to the eleven amendments registered by the PNV, which sought to introduce changes of greater depth, among them the modification of article 2 relative to the unity of Spain, the recognition of the right to self-determination, the limitation of the inviolability of the King and the repeal of article 155, which empowers the Government to intervene in autonomous communities.