Spain's diffused parliamentarism compared to models of rationalised parliamentarism

Abstract

The parliamentary system is characterised by the fact that the executive is elected, controlled and dismissed by the legislature. The rationalised parliamentary system is a variant of this system that legalises the relations between the two powers with a predetermined purpose: to guarantee the stability of governments in the face of occasional hostile majorities in parliaments. It was born in the Europe of the turbulent 1920s and consolidated throughout democratic Europe after the Second World War, with a multitude of rules, including the constructive motion of censure, established for the first time in the Württemberg-Baden Constitution (1946). In Spain, the Republican Constitution of 1931 already included some rules of this rationalised parliamentarism, which were increased and perfected in the Constitution of 1978 to the symbolic point of inverting the order in which the two powers appear in the corresponding constitutional title: "On the relations between the Government and the Cortes Generales" (V). If the constitutional text is already tilted in favour of the Government, the Constitution actually in force, its application, has done so much more. It is particularly noteworthy that the Government's intrusion into the legislative power —designed for situations of "extraordinary and urgent need"— has become a daily occurrence. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced this tendency, just as —Churchill dixit— happened in Britain during the First World War.