Spanish parliamentarism is a tradition of political representation, legislative activity and governmental control, or parliamentary control of the government, that dates back to the medieval Cortes and the Ancien Régime, in a manner equivalent to the parliamentary system of other Western European nation-states (the Parliament of England or the Estates General of France).
Studies The meeting places, parliamentary customs and habits, and the practice of parliamentary debates with their consequent oratory,Cuenca, op. cit, constitute the most visible formal aspects of that tradition.
Several prosopographical studies have been carried out on the deputies, senators or procurators in Cortes —and in general, of the bureaucratic elites— in different periods, detecting the systematic repetition of the same families —representing different parties—, in addition to other professional and formative traits.*
Families such as the Maura, the Calvo Sotelo, the Gil-Robles or the Aznar have provided several examples. One of the most obvious and recent is the kinship between Alberto Ruiz Gallardón (PP) and Trinidad Jiménez (PSOE), adversaries in the Madrid regional elections.
Up to the 17th century
The Cortes, an institution derived from the Curia regia, began to take shape as a parliamentary institution of representation of the estates in the different Christian peninsular kingdoms from the end of the 12th century onwards. They meant the explicitness and periodic renewal of the political relationship between "king" and "kingdom". The first Cortes with the participation of the representatives of the cities were the Cortes of León of 1188, convened by the León monarch Alfonso IX. They were convened very frequently in the late Middle Ages and until the middle of the 17th century, when their functions were almost exclusively fiscal in the Crown of Castile, and of much greater competence in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon and Navarre, where the lesser royal power determined a greater power of the Cortes, supported by a whole theorization of the relationship between the two institutions.
The unification of the kingdoms of the Hispanic Monarchy (which between 1580 and 1640 included the kingdom of Portugal) did not mean institutional homogenization, and the Cortes of each kingdom maintained their separate existence, leaving the Cortes of Castile as the main fiscal support of the Monarchy throughout the Habsburg period (16th and 17th centuries).
In the second half of the 17th century the Cortes practically ceased to be convened.
Cortes of Aragon Cortes of Castile General Court of Catalonia Cortes of León (the first, in 1188; since the 13th century they were convened jointly with those of Castile). Cortes of Navarre (the last, convened in 1828–1829) Portuguese Cortes Valencian Cortes
Despite some bibliographical use of the expression "Majorcan Corts", there was no institution equivalent to the Cortes in the kingdom of Majorca, with the Gran i General Consell fulfilling a similar role to a certain extent. When the meetings of the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon were held jointly, Majorcan representatives attended (see Cortes of Aragon).
18th century With the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1715), the new Bourbon dynasty imposed the Nueva Planta Decrees, which annulled the particularist fueros of the Crown of Aragon, which allowed the kings to jointly convene the Cortes of all the kingdoms of the Hispanic Monarchy (except the Cortes of Navarre) following the customs and traditions of the Cortes of Castile, which became known as the Cortes Generales del Reino (General Courts of the Kingdom). They only had two convocations in the whole of the 18th century, to swear in the heir and to take notice of the successive alterations of the law of succession (Salic Law).
Cortes of Madrid of 1713. Philip V initiated the Bourbon dynasty with the War of Spanish Succession, which in Spain is a civil war between Austracists and Bourbons. The Austracists were the majority in the Crown of Aragon, and their defeat allowed the imposition of the Bourbon absolutism that tried to centralize the institutions of the different peninsular kingdoms in the Castilian ones (Nueva Planta Decrees). Cortes were convened for the first time in Madrid, which were to be attended not only by the representatives of the Castilian cities, but also by representatives of Aragonese, Valencian, Catalan and Majorcan cities, which is why they were called Cortes Generales del Reino (General Courts of the Kingdom). It was approved, in the form of an Auto Acordado, the reception in Spain of the Salic Law, the traditional law of the French monarchy. Among other things, the Salic Law altered the traditional law of succession, by preventing the succession of women to the throne (nulla portio fæminis); although the issue remained a theoretical assumption that was not really resolved until the Carlist Wars. Different "pleas" were received from the procurators, such as the rationalization of taxes (at the suggestion of the Valencians, the Equivalent was established the following year). Cortes of Madrid of 1789. Charles IV was the first monarch to convene the Cortes Generales to swear in the heir to the Crown as Prince of Asturias. He did so for the swearing in of his son Ferdinand (the future Ferdinand VII). He took advantage of the occasion to repeal the Salic Law, arguing that this would restore to their former force and effect the venerated laws that had placed Isabella the Catholic on the Throne of Castile.Colmeiro, op. cit.
19th century
Parliamentarism in Cádiz
The agitated political life of the Contemporary Age in Spain was punctually reflected in each of the phases that Spanish parliamentarism went through.
Inaugurating the characteristics of contemporary liberal parliamentarism (national sovereignty, universal suffrage, separation of powers, recognition of rights), the Cortes of Cadiz stood out for their vital debates and the revolutionary nature of their legislation. These Cortes in fact exercised all the power, given that Ferdinand VII remained until 22 March 1814, retained in France by Napoleon. Meeting in 1810 in Cadiz, as it was the only city defensible against the French invasion, they used the so-called Real Teatro de las Cortes as their meeting place. At the end of the war, during a brief period in 1814, they chose the former church of the Colegio de Doña María de Aragón of the Augustinian friars as their meeting place in the city of Madrid, part of the complex of the Royal Monastery of La Encarnación.
After the initial moderate reform proposals of the so-called jovellanists (Antonio de Capmany) were overwhelmed, the Cadiz deputies were politically divided into two tendencies: liberals and absolutists. The predominance of the liberals (Agustín Argüelles, Diego Muñoz Torrero, the Count of Toreno) determined the orientation of their legislative work towards the institutional dismantling of the — and the construction of a liberal State (suppression of the seigniories and the Inquisition, freedom of the press, drafting of the constitution of 1812). One of the absolutist deputies, the Bishop of Orense Pedro de Quevedo y Quintano, was sanctioned for protesting during the oath to the Constitution.
Among the presidents of the Cortes were Muñoz Torrero, Ramón Lázaro de Dou, Jaime Creus Martí (who would later preside over the absolutist Urgel Regency), Miguel Antonio de Zumalacárregui (brother of the later Carlist leader) and several representatives of the Spanish Americans, such as Antonio Joaquín Pérez Martínez (who intervened in the later independence of Mexico).
The word "liberal", which was born in the Cadiz debates, spread to the international political vocabulary.
Courts of the Trienio Liberal
The Pronunciamiento of Riego (in Cabezas de San Juan, 1 January 1820) put an end to the first absolutist period of Ferdinand VII, who shortly after returning to Spain had dissolved the Cortes and declared the Cadiz legislation null and void (4 May 1814). Once the constitution of 1812 was reestablished, the Cortes were reconvened. The new Cortes of the Trienio Liberal met in Madrid, in the same building of the Colegio de doña María de Aragón, between 1820 and 1823. There were two convocations (1820 and 1822) in which the deputies were elected with the current constitutional criteria (universal male indirect suffrage and the same constituencies, including the representation of the American Spaniards, whose territory was in the midst of a war for independence). They had a brief and agitated life, characterized by internal confrontations between doceañistas and veinteañistas liberals. Among the presidents of the Cortes were José de Espiga (who presided over the inaugural session and the swearing in of the king in 1820), Rafael del Riego himself (those of 1822), José María Calatrava, Miguel Ricardo de Álava, Manuel Flores Calderón, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa and the Count of Toreno.
Given the distrust between king and Cortes, the latter exercised power in practice, without taking into account the executive powers of the monarch, whom the foreign powers considered a prisoner (as had happened in the French Revolution with Louis XVI). The matter of the diplomatic notes issued was submitted to the Cortes for deliberation; when they were rejected by both the Congress and the Government, they gave reason to the powers of the Holy Alliance to intervene in defense of royal absolutism and to commission France to invade Spain with the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis. The Cortes left Madrid on 23 May 1823, withdrawing first to Seville and then to Cadiz, forcing the king to accompany them; until the military defeat was evident (battle of Trocadero), and with it its dissolution and the return to power of Fernando VII as absolute king (23 September 1823) for the next ten years (Ominous Decade).
Last Cortes of the Ancien Régime The Cortes of Madrid of 1833 were the last ones convened with the criteria of the Ancien Régime. Appealing to the old customs and laws of Castile, Fernando VII summoned the Cortes to swear in his daughter Isabel (the future Isabella II of Spain) as Princess of Asturias. Gathered in the Church of Saint Jerome the Royal, they took the oath. In the context of the end of his reign, when the rapprochement between the more moderate elements of the absolutists and the liberals was taking place, this convocation was seen as a symptom of political openness, which was confirmed in the following period.
Parliamentarism of the Isabelline period
The Cortes of Madrid of 1834, under the regency of Maria Christina, were convened by means of a Royal Statute for the convocation of the general Cortes of the Kingdom, a quasi-constitutional text (of the type of carta otorgada) under whose conditions the parliamentary life of the reign of Isabella II began, in the midst of the first Carlist war and characterized by the alternation in power, through pronunciamiento of military men linked to political groups (the so-called "espadones" or "ayacuchos"), of moderate and progressive liberals. The electoral system was based on the census suffrage, which restricted the vote to those who had a well-to-do social position, and there was a change from indirect election to direct election of deputies.