The renewed Cortes will be constituted on August 17 with the election of the Tables of Congress and the Senate

MADRID, 22 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The deputies and senators elected in the general elections this Sunday will take possession of their seats on August 17, the day that Congress and the Senate are constituted in separate plenary sessions with which the fifteenth Legislature will open.

The constitutive sessions of Congress and the Senate will begin at ten in the morning and will take place simultaneously, each with its own rules.

In Congress, the session will be chaired by the oldest elected person who will be attended by the two youngest, as secretaries, who will be in charge of reading the names of those elected and the contentious-electoral appeals filed. The socialist Agustín Zamarrón, who has presided over the last constitutive sessions of Congress and who this time does not repeat on the lists, will no longer be there.

Next, the members of the new Congress Table will be elected by secret ballot and ballot box, a vote for which the parties usually reach agreements that may be the prelude to future investiture pacts.

To occupy the Presidency, the person who obtains the vote of the absolute majority will be elected. If in the first round there is no candidate who achieves that said majority, the vote between the two with the most support will be repeated and the position will be won by the one who obtains the most votes (simple majority).

Next, four vice-presidents and four secretaries will be appointed, with the people with the greatest number of votes being elected. In the previous legislature, the PSOE had three positions on the Board (Presidency, a vice-presidency and a secretary), the same as United We Can (one vice-president and two secretaries), the PP achieved a vice-presidency and a secretary and Vox, a vice-presidency.

Once these votes have concluded, those elected will take their positions at the Presidential Table and whoever has achieved the Presidency will request from the other deputies the oath or promise to abide by the Constitution, a process that has not been exempt from controversy in recent years due to the formulas used above all by the Catalan separatists.

In the case of the Upper House, the session will be opened by the first senator who has presented his credentials, who will read the names of his colleagues and the challenges that may have been presented. Afterwards, the Age Table will be constituted, also with the oldest elect in the Presidency who, where appropriate, will have the four youngest senators as secretaries.

Subsequently, the president will be elected, who will also need to gather an absolute majority in the first round and a simple majority in the second, as well as the rest of the members of the Board, in this case two vice-presidents and four secretaries. Those chairs will be occupied by those who obtain the most support.

Once this procedure is finished, the president of the elected Senate calls the senators one by one so that they proceed to swear or promise the Constitution before the presidential table. They may use the official language they wish.

Both in Congress and in the Senate, the newly appointed presidents may deliver a speech if they consider it so and they will declare the Chambers constituted. Then they will notify the King, the other Chamber and the Government. The visit of the president of Congress to Zarzuela is the 'starting gun' for the round of consultations of the Head of State with a view to the investiture to be prepared.

The Tables of each Chamber will meet once this first session has been lifted to begin to formalize the creation of the parliamentary groups, which must be created in the following five days, in principle, on August 23.

To have your own group, you must have at least 15 seats or add five deputies and obtain 5% of the votes throughout the country, or 15% in all constituencies in which you compete.

Until now, the legislatures with the most groups have been the one that has just ended and the first, with a dozen in both cases. Now the forecast is that the number will be less, since Ciudadanos does not appear and Sumar includes formations such as Más País and Compromís, which until now have been in the Plural Group. Nor do the Forum and the PRC attend, with which, foreseeably, the Mixed Group, which has hosted seven parties, will bring together fewer formations.

In the legislature that took place between 1979-1982 there were also ten parliamentary formations, although three of them were from the PSOE (Socialist Group, Basque Socialists and Catalan Socialists), a multiplicity of voices that the Regulations approved at the end of that stage already prohibited.

It operated with eight groups in the first legislature of the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2008) and in the short legislature of 2019, which barely lasted five months, from May to September 2019.

In most of the 14 legislatures that have existed since the establishment of democracy, the Chamber has been divided into seven groups. This happened in the Constituent Assembly (1977-1979) -although in practice there were eight because there were two Socialists-, from the fourth (1989-1993) to the seventh (2000-2004), in the one with the absolute majority of Mariano Rajoy (2011-2016) and in his last one (2016-2019).

They worked with six groups in the first two legislatures of Felipe González, from 1982 to 1986, the first, and from 1986 to 1989, the second, and also in the second term of the socialist Rodríguez Zapatero (2008-2011).

In the legislature that ends, each group received a fixed subsidy of 364,160.64 euros per year (30,346.72 per month) and a variable depending on the number of deputies of each of them, which was established at 1,746.16 euros per month for each parliamentarian.