Forum speculates about alleged legal tricks by Spain's Government

The legal tricks a forum attributes to Spain's Government to avoid letting go of power

The suspicion is spreading fast: any decision the Government takes will be a trick. That is how a collective analysis begins, one that tries to anticipate the legal moves by which the Executive could entrench itself. The starting point is the Fruta Permanente (Permanent Fruta), the body that replaces the full chamber when Parliament is dissolved or its term has expired. Its functions include validating decree-laws, authorising states of alarm, emergency and siege, and being distributed proportionally among parliamentary groups.

What the Permanent Fruta is and why it raises concerns

The most repeated hypothesis holds that the Executive could dissolve the Cortes, call elections and, as a caretaker government, pass an omnibus decree that the Permanent Fruta would have to accept or reject as a whole. No amendments. No room for manoeuvre. An all-or-nothing situation mixing housing laws, the so-called grandchildren law (a measure regularising the status of descendants of Spaniards) and measures that the parliamentary partners could not strike down without sinking the entire package. According to this analysis, the mechanism would turn the procedure into a shell game.

Ceuta, Segarro and the state of siege

Another line of suspicion points to the King and Queen's visit to Ceuta and Melilla. There is speculation that a new border incident could serve as an excuse to declare a state of siege and stay in power. The technical difference is not minor: the state of emergency lasts one month, whereas the state of siege has no time limit. The sequence described includes people mobilising towards the border, riots in Madrid and a response that would be attributed to the right and the Crown.

Electoral fraud, elections and judicial control

The catalogue of scenarios includes calling elections on a Friday instead of a Sunday, banning a party, weakening the judiciary and framing the vote as a plebiscite between monarchy and republic, or between a federal and a unitary state. The possibility of refusing to leave power and setting the streets alight as underlying pressure is also mentioned.

Housing, smokescreen and the grandchildren law

The housing decree sits at the centre of all the predictions. Some claim its rejection was already agreed with the nationalist partners to stage a theatre of protests in the Puerta del Sol and other cities. The theory of the weekend to reflect on the part of the Prime Minister fits that script. The alternative suggested is passing a new grandchildren law under another name and keeping it in force until the elections. Housing, in this reading, would be a smokescreen: the average deputy owns six or seven rental properties, so they would trust that the PP repeals the law afterwards.

Lockdown and a Russian pathogen

There are those who do not rule out a new Russian pathogen and a timely lockdown. It worked once before, the argument goes, and it would allow governing almost sine die by decree. The reference to Machiavelli closes the circle: his book, they say, has ended up in the children's section after this.

The analysis gets stuck at one point: none of these hypotheses has been confirmed and all of them depend on the Executive deciding to make the first move. Until then, the only certainty is the suspicion.