Control parlamentario y designación de órganos constitucionales en EspañaTeoría y práctica

Resum

With a view to appointing candidates with technical capacity and profes- sional excellence, the parliamentary appointment mechanisms of the highest State bodies are constitutionally regulated in ways that express the need to achieve a reinforced consensus among the political forces represented in the Chambers. Likewise, by giving them a longer duration, those regulations aim to separate the appointees’ mandates from the parliamentary cycle. These norms appear to be based on a common substratum: to provide a qualified democratic legitimacy to instances of a countermajoritarian nature that, by definition, lack such legitimacy. In Spain, the effects of these constitu- tional provisions, as well as their subsequent regulatory development, have largely been confined to legal theory. In practice, however, the situation is persistently and increasingly pathological. The constitutional sense of broad majorities has been altered completely by the implementation of a quota system in which the candidates are unilaterally set and reciprocally accepted. This modus operandi, moreover, relegates the participation of the Chambers in the elective processes to the role of ‘stone guest’. The democratic legitimacy conferred by its exercise, therefore, is circumscribed to a pre-eminently formal sphere. Likewise, the mandate periods have lost their temporal certainty, in such a way that the extensions have become the rule and timely renewal the exception. The article argues, therefore, that a recuperation of the Constitution’s design is an urgent requirement. However, such a change presupposes a profound transformation of the dominant political dynamics, which to expect seems utterly unrealistic. Without losing sight of this difficulty, however, the paper proposes a series of reforms of parliamentary regulations are proposed which would contribute to substantially improving the existing harmful institutional context.