2023-07-25 05:56:13
The president of the Spanish government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, and his conservative rival, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, took the first steps this Monday to solve the puzzle of the formation of a government, after the elections on Sunday did not give any easy chances.
The fourth European economy seemed headed for a political blockade after on Sunday, defying all the polls that predicted his debacle, Sánchez managed to limit the advance of the right-wing opposition.
Both candidates met their parties the day after election night to discuss strategies and possible alliances.
Feijóo’s Popular Party (PP, conservatives) was the winner with 136 seats out of a total of 350 in the Congress of Deputies, while the far-right Vox party, his only potential ally, got 33.
However, they add up to only 169 seats, far from the absolute majority of 176 that allows the formation of a government.
On the other side, Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) won 122 seats and Sumar, his radical left ally, 31, but both are in a better position to win support from Basque and Catalan regionalist parties.
Puigdemont, clave
“I have started the contacts taking into account that Spain has decided that there is no absolute majority of a single party, but also taking into account that it has not decided that there are impossible formulas that guarantee the investiture” of a government, Feijóo told his leaders gathered in Madrid.
For Sánchez, the main stumbling block will be to obtain at least one abstention from Junts per Catalunya, the party of the Catalan independence leader Carles Puigdemont, a refugee in Belgium after the 2017 secessionist attempt, which has already advanced that it will not give away anything.
Sumar made a move and announced on Monday that he had already commissioned one of his former leaders in Catalonia to start negotiations with Junts to “explore all avenues of agreement”, although a leader of this Catalan party, Jordi Turull, said that he did not see “the investiture (of Sánchez) anywhere right now”.
This gave the PP arguments to demand that its leader be allowed to form a government: “the alternative to Feijóo is for Puigdemont to rule the government of Spain,” said Juanma Moreno, president of the Andalusia region.
The result of the elections “will mark the beginning of a period of political uncertainty that will last for months,” warned Federico Santi, an expert at Eurasia Group, in line with Spanish newspapers, which predicted, as in the case of El País, that a new government is “up in the air.”
On Sunday night, in front of his followers gathered at the PP headquarters in Madrid, Feijóo claimed his right to form a government as the “candidate of the party with the most votes.”
Without an absolute majority with Vox, Feijóo wants to govern in a minority, but for that he would need the abstention of the Socialists during the investiture vote in Parliament, something that the Socialists have already said they will not do.
Sánchez could gather a total of 172 deputies, more than the conservative leader, so if JxCat abstains, he could achieve the investiture in the second vote in Congress, where only more Yes than No is required.
Otherwise, Spain, which already experienced electoral repetitions after blockades in 2015 and 2019, would be condemned to return to the polls in the coming months, just at a time when the country holds, from July to December, the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union.
This election had aroused great interest abroad due to the possibility of a coalition of PP and Vox coming to power in a country considered a pioneer in the rights of women or the LGBT community.
Had that scenario occurred, it would have been the first time that the extreme right had come to power since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
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