The Constitutional Court has established in its doctrine that the seat of a parliamentarian does not belong to the party on whose lists he was elected, but to the deputy or senator himself, as a representative of the citizens who elected him. The court of guarantees maintains this interpretation since its first ruling on the dilemma that occurs in cases of rupture between the parliamentarian and the organization that included him on its lists. The ruling occurred in 1983, with the first composition of the guarantee body, whose doctrine was included that same year in a second resolution. It was clear, therefore, that in no case might the party take away the seat obtained from the deputy or senator, no matter how much it had caused some damage to the organization, by breaking voting discipline, for example, or for some other reason. deserving of sanction, in accordance with the regulatory norms of the parliamentary groups.
That first case to be brought before the court was that of Miguel Ángel Bellido del Pino, mayor of Andújar (Jaén), who in August 1980 was expelled from the PSOE and the municipal corporation four months following becoming mayor. The party wanted to appoint another person for this responsibility, but Bellido refused to resign so that the list might run and that triggered the conflict. The Constitutional Court argued that article 23.1 of the Constitution enshrines the right of citizens to participate in public affairs through their representatives and that, therefore, “the permanence of the representatives depends on the will of the voters and not on the will of the party.”
The ruling also recalls that article 6 recognizes the role of parties in political pluralism, but “the right to participate corresponds to citizens and not to parties; “The elected representatives are those of the citizens and not of the parties, and permanence in office cannot depend on the will of the parties, but on that expressed by the voters.” The sentence came when the municipal mandate was coming to an end, so Bellido’s reinstatement in office was very short-lived.
A few weeks later, the Constitutional Court issued another ruling in the same direction and for which Judge Francisco Rubio Llorente, later vice president of the court, was the speaker. The ruling also ordered that five PCE councilors be replaced, including Cristina Almeida, who had been expelled from the Madrid City Council following a confrontation with the communist leadership. The ruling stated verbatim that the elected officials, “once elected, are not those of those who voted for them, but of the entire electoral body, and holders, therefore, of a public function that cannot be terminated by decisions of entities that “They are not organs of the State.”
The court argued that the decision of citizens when choosing their representatives implies designating specific people as such. Therefore, the Constitutional Court stressed that the permanence of those elected in office “cannot be subordinated to any power that does not also emanate from the popular will.” Based on these reasoning, the court ruled that an article of the electoral law then in force violated the right of citizens to participate in public affairs, and annulled it.
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In 2003, however, the then president of the Constitutional Court, Manuel Jiménez de Parga, was in favor of clarifying the doctrine that in 1983 established that the seat is the property of the deputy. He did it before Tamayazo in the Community of Madrid, an event due to which two socialist deputies boycotted the election of Rafael Simancas as regional president. Jiménez de Parga then explained during the presentation of the Court’s Annual Report that control mechanisms for the parties would have to be established until the moment in which a chamber begins to carry out its political work, following the investiture debate, to avoid both what he considered as a dictatorship of the parties over the parliamentarians as situations like the one recorded in Madrid.
The Constitutional Court decided in September to grant protection to former deputy Teresa Rodríguez and eight other members of the Andalusian Parliament who were expelled from their parliamentary group in 2020 at the request of Podemos and IU, following breaking with both Rodríguez’s formation, Anticapitalistas, with which he had coalition state. The ruling considered that the Bureau of said Parliament violated the fundamental rights of all of them by accepting said expulsion without correctly applying the chamber’s regulations, and that this caused them to remain in the autonomous assembly as non-attached deputies, which implied less time for interventions and less funds for their parliamentary work.
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