The Parliament that voted with cards

The first plenary session after ten days of protests should have been the place where the crisis in the streets got a political answer. The agenda opened precisely with the interpellation over police conduct. Instead, the public saw one lawmaker pulling the microphone away from another, chairs overturned around the podium and draft laws passed by a show of voting cards because the electronic system had been damaged.

The opposition is right to demand that Parliament talk about the violence against students. But blocking the podium does not bring that debate closer; it pushes it further away. An interpellation of the interior minister is the strongest tool the opposition has to force the government to account in public, with questions and answers that stay on the record. When the chamber turns into a brawl, the minister walks out without being questioned.

The majority has nothing to be proud of either. Going straight to a vote, without a single word of discussion, on the day lecturers are marching toward Parliament and the building is surrounded by barriers and water cannons, tells citizens that the institution works only as a machine for counting votes. The laws passed may be necessary, but the way they were passed added no legitimacy to them.

The protesters outside are asking to be heard. Inside, their elected representatives could not even manage to hear one another. That contrast is more dangerous than any stone thrown in the street, because it tells young people that the institutional route leads nowhere.

The speaker of Parliament and the heads of the two parliamentary groups have a simple task for the next session: the interpellation of the interior minister must be held in full, with equal time and without interruption. If Parliament cannot manage even that, it cannot ask others for calm.