“One day you are decisive in forming a government in Spain and the next day Spain orders your arrest,” Carles Puigdemont ironized this Monday on his social networks. the former Catalan president who esced of Spain to avoid going to jail for having unilaterally declared the independence of Catalonia in 2017.
Why would the separatist leader be the key for Spain to have a new government?
Because the votes that his party, Junts per Catalunya (JxCAT), obtained on Sunday they would be indispensable so that the current president and PSOE candidate for re-election, Pedro Sanchez, can add the necessary support so that Parliament anoints him as president of the government, despite having come second in Sunday’s elections.
The Spanish voted on July 23 for a new government that, one day after the elections, seems to be far from formed.
And something even more destabilizing: it is a big question mark whether Spain will have a government in the coming months or if the blockade will lead to an inevitable electoral repetition.
Another relevant piece of information provided by the polls on Sunday the 23rd is the key they hold in their hands the pro-independence and regionalist parties on the board of national politics when it comes to negotiating majorities that enable the pointment of a new president.
parliamentary system
Because in the Spanish parliamentary system people do not vote for presidents but lists of deputies that will integrate the Parliament. It is from there that the candidate who manages to have the greatest amount of support will come from to be sworn in as president.
This is what the PP candidate, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, reveals, who, despite having won the elections in number of votes, could only seat 136 deputies in Parliament, that is, 40 less than the 176 it would take to reach an absolute majoritythat is, half plus one of the 350 seats that make up Congress.
Not even adding the 33 seats that Vox could providethe far-right party with which the PP already governs in several autonomies and municipalities, would reach 176.
Calculator in hand, a possible ally would be the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which kept 5 seats and lost one.
Canarian Coalition, the party from the islands that won a seat and with which the PP is already part of a government coalition, could also give it its support. And it would be possible to add one more: the deputy for Union del Pueblo Navarro.
But despite the fact that the PP would scratch the 176, these minority parties They do not see with good eyes that Vox is part of the right-wing government alternative.
The attempt of Nunez Feijoo
This Monday afternoon, Nunez Feijoo announced that he will try anyway to present himself for an investiture debate.
“As the candidate of the most voted party, I think that my duty is to open the dialogue to lead that dialogue from the first minute and to try to govern this country according to the electoral results”, he had said on Sunday.
He longs for the PSOE to abstain in a possible vote to make him president, an unthinkable scenario for Pedro Sanchez, the PSOE candidate who will do everything possible to achieve his re-election.
This Monday, Sanchez let it be known that there will be no blockade or electoral repetition.
“Spanish democracy will find the formula for governability”he told his own.
What he has not yet confessed is how he will do so that the numbers give him having obtained 122 deputies on Sunday.
The PSOE takes the coalition with Sumar for granted, which would contribute its 31 seats and the reissue of Catalan and Basque independence supporters that they already facilitated the investiture for him to arrive at the Moncloa Palace in 2019.
independentistas
At that time, Sanchez needed the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), which had 13 seats, but it was not necessary to convince Junts per Catalunya (JxCAT), the other pro-independence party. Junts responds to Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan president.
“Puigdemont will not let Sanchez sleep”, they said this Monday from JxCAT, a less negotiating force when it comes to talking about Catalan independence.
“Our pulse will not tremble at all. We will not make Pedro Sanchez president in exchange for nothing ”Miriam Nogueras, head of the Junts list in Congress, said on election night.
“Junts was not born to stabilize the Spanish State, but for Catalonia to be an independent State,” added Nogueras.
They will ask, in exchange for their support or abstention for Sanchez to be sworn in as president, a self-determination referendum and amnesty for Puigdemontwhom the Spanish Justice tried to extradite to judge him.
The Catalan knew how to find intricacies in the European Justice to avoid it. He managed to become an MEP but in early July, the General Court of the European Union ruled withdraw parliamentary immunity.
In the last few hours, the Spanish Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office asked Pablo Llarena, the judge who sentenced the Catalan separatists who organized the separatist attempt with Puigdemont, to issue an arrest warrant against him.
faults
Vox did not make self-criticism about the electoral result it obtained on Sunday. It went from having 52 deputies to 33.
Its candidate, Santiago Abascal, blamed the PP for the dispointment.
He spoke of rigged polls “that have led some to sell the bear skin before hunting it and that have had a clear consequence: demobilization”, Abascal shot at Nunez Feijoo.
And he attacked the left: “Pedro Sanchez, even losing the elections, can block an investiture. And worse still: it could be invested with the support of communismfrom coup separatism and terrorism, now with much more blackmail cacity than in the previous Legislature,” Abascal said.
Something similar hpened within the Sumar coalition of leftist forces, which absorbed United We Can, Izquierda Unida and other parties.
It was their electoral debut but, far from preserving, or even increasing the parliamentary representation that those parties had individually achieved, got only 31 seats.
“Sumar leaves more than 700,000 votes and many seats compared to the worst result of United We Can. The strategy of renouncing feminism and make Podemos invisible It has not worked electorally”, lamented Ione Belarra, general secretary of Podemos and minister of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda of the current coalition government, on Monday.
The PP, for its part, is not giving up. “We got three million more votes than in the last general elections. Our obligation now is that a period of uncertainty does not open up in Spain,” Nunez Feijoo said from the balcony of the PP headquarters in the center of Madrid on election night.
Late. In Spain there is no one who in the early hours of Monday has not gone to sleep worried.
Madrid. Correspondent
Source: Clarin
