The independentist who has changed the Constitution from Formentera

PalmaThe former vice-president of the Parliament of Catalonia and one of the leading figures of the independence movement, Josep Costa, received a message at the end of April: “We’ve done it! The PP has voted for it! The King will sign this!”. It was from a previous life before politics. It was the technical secretary of the Consell de Formentera, Àngel Navarro, with whom he had worked as a lawyer at the island institution. Both drafted the reform of the Constitution which, years later, has ended up giving a senator to Formentera. It was a “regionalist and assertive” text, recalls Costa, born in Ibiza: “Along the way, many things have been destroyed, but some have survived”. For example, the toponym ‘Illes Balears’ in Catalan; and the fact that it states that the Constitution “restored” democracy in Spain, an implicit reference to the II Republic.

If one considers that the removal of a hyphen is what has given Formentera a senator – Article 69.3 of the Constitution grouped ‘Eivissa-Formentera’ as a single electoral constituency and now there will be two – it becomes clear how important each word of the Magna Carta is. This is why jurists insist that the lexicon represents a precedent. “To see this approved with the votes of the PP is surreal,” explains Costa: “It is written from a rather un-Spanish perspective”.

This has been the fourth constitutional reform in the history of democracy, and the first driven from the periphery of the State. It had the support of all parties except Vox. It was this formation, with the support of the PP, that changed, through amendments, the word ‘Eivissa’ to put it in Spanish: ‘Ibiza’. “Vox said that the toponym must be in Spanish, the PP got scared and accepted it,” summarizes Navarro, who traveled to the Senate to attend the debate on the approval of the reform, on April 23rd.

“The toponyms issue was our battle, it wasn’t even the politicians’,” recalls Costa. “We haven’t achieved it with Ibiza, but it does say ‘Illes Balears’ instead of ‘Islas Baleares’ [in the explanatory memorandum of the Spanish version of the reform], and we did it absolutely consciously,” he adds triumphantly. How so? As Navarro explains, this toponym could not be changed because it is already enshrined in the Statute of Autonomy, which is cited in the legislative amendment: “Our toponym written in Catalan had never reached the Courts, neither Catalonia nor the Valencian Community has it”.

“How is it possible they haven’t censored it?”

The preamble of the text also establishes that "the approval of the 1978 Constitution led to the restoration of democracy". This term, 'restoration', is laden with symbolism. "It connects with the freedoms of the Second Republic, and no one has noticed", points out Navarro. Precisely, this fragment was drafted by Costa. "In the Spanish nationalist narrative, autonomies, nationalities, and regions originate from the Constitution", he considers. With this cautiously chosen verb, therefore, it is explained that "it is the peoples who are recovering the democracy that Francoism had taken from them through the Constitution, because they existed before", he says. "How is it possible that they haven't censored it to us?", he wonders.

Navarro also highlights other novelties, such as the inclusion of the toponym of the Pitiüses Islands – in Spanish – for the first time in the Constitution, as well as the correction and proper writing of the names of El Hierro and La Gomera to adapt them to the Statute of the Canary Islands. The technician, who also participated in the creation of the Formentera Council in 2007, further emphasizes that the reform shields the island's functioning as a unique institution: “It is a municipality that has a council, which has autonomous powers, three in one,” in addition to the figure of all island councils as institutions of island self-government. “From now on, the statutes of autonomy will no longer be able to change it,” he states.

This text has come a long way. The plenary session of the Council approved it in 2017: “The Balearic Parliament sent it to Madrid and there it slept the sleep of the just, until the president of Congress, Francina Armengol, resurrected it,” says Navarro. Beyond expanding Formentera's political representation, this reform gives voice to a less centralist conception of the State.