VOX’s Bridge to Nowhere

In his recent scholarly book Losing to Win (2020), University of Nevada political scientist Jeremy Gelman probes the causes of an unsettling phenomenon in American politics—the recession of lawmaking. Gelman argues that as partisan polarization has intensified nationwide, and as cable TV and Netflix shows have dramatized the workings of Washington, Congress has increasingly undermined its own role as the venue for drafting, debating, amending, and passing the nation’s laws. Instead, the House—and to a lesser extent the Senate—have gradually become the stage for filibusters, partisan bickering, personalistic grandstanding, and performative pieces of legislation such as bills termed ‘dead on arrival’ (DoA). Borrowed from the medical jargon’s term for a patient that arrives dead at the clinical ward, this phrase refers to bills that are known to lack the requisite threshold of support to warrant wider consideration, but that are nonetheless filed to score messaging points.

The congressional ailment Gelman diagnosed isn’t exclusive to America, mind you. In fact, it has plagued European parliaments for much longer, whether one goes by the procedural yelling at the UK House of Commons or the ministerial showmanship at France’s Assemblée Nationale. Spain is the latest country to indulge this pernicious tradition. The very archetype of a dead-on-arrival bill will be filed by the right-wing VOX party in the coming days. VOX has indeed been putting the finishing touches to a so-called motion of no confidence to oust the socialist PM Pedro Sánchez, which will be debated on Tuesday, March 22nd and ultimately voted in on Wednesday the 23rd. It has virtually no chance of succeeding. With only 52 MPs in a legislature of 350, the motion has about the same likelihood of success as Senator Ron Paul’s yearly bill to abolish the federal reserve or the effort by progressive Democrats to extend statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C. Unless the right-of-center Partido Popular (PP) chooses in the end to abstain rather than oppose, VOX’s bill will prove little more than a gimmick.

Critics of the bill among the PP and the socialists claim that it distracts from the imperative of governing and legislating even under an unpopular executive, but this shouldn’t mean that the concerns the bill outlines are irrelevant. The bill is a fitting repository for all the deeply held grievances VOX has accumulated since Sánchez rose to office on a coalition backed by parties whose support he had previously sworn he would never seek. These are the neo-communist Podemos party and a slew of Left-regionalist parties from Catalonia, Galicia, Valencia, and the Basque Country, all of whom VOX deems enemies of Spain’s unity and constitutional order. To be sure, this is not the first motion of no confidence in this congressional sitting. One was filed in October 2020. It met the same fate that awaits this upcoming bill after then-PP leader Pablo Casado declined to support it for the same reasons that his successor, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, will not support its latest iteration.

If Spain’s trajectory, at the time the 2020 motion was filed, was already dismal, the series of crises, cockups, and scandals that have occurred in the intervening two years make this latest one, according to VOX, even more necessary. Before Christmas, the government passed a bill pandering to the feminist crowd that vowed to harshen criminal sentences for sexual offenders. However, it was invoked by multiple judges across the country to revise downwards—or altogether scrap—the sentences of countless convicted rapists and abusers. In December, in a move aimed at securing their backing of the government’s budget, Sánchez agreed to a key demand by the Catalan secessionists: scrapping sedition from the penal code, the offence with which key regional leaders were charged following the region’s illegal 2017 referendum. And last, in a move VOX deems akin to court packing, the government has lowered the threshold for appointing judges to the Constitutional Tribunal.

Besides reflecting VOX’s heightened degree of anger at Sánchez, this latest motion is special in two ways. First, it will be filed about 10 months away from a general election that Sánchez is expected to lose, and in the unlikely case it succeeds, it will bring forth that election to coincide with the local and regional races slated for May this year. Secondly, this time the motion isn’t headlined by VOX leader Santiago Abascal but by economist and academic Ramón Tamames, whose public career began within the ranks of the Communist Party (PCE), then in various niche left-wing groupings. Since then, he gradually shifted Right. Several press scoops have arisen portraying Tamames’ views on Spanish territorial administration—such as when he called for Catalonia to be deemed a ‘nation’—as incompatible with VOX’s centralist and nationalistic outlook, but Abascal maintains that his distinguished credentials and lack of party affiliation will give persuasiveness to this motion.

That doesn’t make the motion any less of a moonshot. For one thing, Spaniards will likely cringe as they watch Tamames—who is 90—painfully make it through the three-hour speech he is expected to give, which VOX has no oversight over. The professor’s academic pedigree—he has lectured at various universities, written numerous books, and famously re-edits, periodically, a seminal tome on the Spanish economy—will doubtless serve this motion well. So will his past affiliation with parties of the Left, which underscores how keenly VOX is chasing former progressive voters disillusioned with the Left’s conversion over recent years to ‘wokeism’ and away from the bread-and-butter concerns of traditional progressivism. The motion will, however, prove underwhelming. If at all, it will go down in history as a performative gimmick designed to achieve the unattainable goal of unseating a government whose fiercest opposing party failed to have others rally the cause.