Tag Archives: proroguing parliament

In my earlier June 17^th LDV piece on the concept of proroguing Parliament I reminded readers that the last person on the continent trying to disband a sitting EU parliament was the fascist colonel Tejero who in February 1981 entered the plenary session of the Cortes to disband at gunpoint the Spanish parliament finishing Spain’s transition to a full constitutional democracy.

To give you a flavour of how proroguing is seen here, a small list of continental heads of government who disbanded parliament to get their way without hindrance:

Napoleon in 1799 fled Egypt to conduct a Paris military coup (with grenadiers intimidating parliamentarians in their session) on “18-19 Brumaire” (November) to make himself “First Consul” under a constitution without Civil Rights. Making his brother king of the Dutch vassal “Batavian Republic” in 1806, he eliminated the last vestiges of its parliament. And Napoleon’s nephew in 1851 did the same with the French parliament, eliciting the famous  Karl Marx pamphlet.

Mussolini grabbed power from a string of Liberal governments in 1922, and in combination with conservative politicians had a law adopted in 1923 by a divided parliament giving him an absolute majority after the 1924 elections. The Socialist MP Mateotti protesting over electoral fraud was immediately killed.

These examples give you a picture of how “positive” prorogation is seen on the continent.