Follow the live streaming of Feijóo’s investiture debate in Congress

2023-09-27 01:04:13

Updated: Sep 27, 2023 | 01:04
27 sep 2023 | 01:04

Decisive hours begin to know the political future of Spain. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, candidate for the Presidency of the Government, faces a complicated, if not impossible, investiture debate. The leader of the popular parties arrives at the Congress of Deputies without sufficient support to be the new head of the Executive. This has not, however, prevented him from maintaining his commitment to reaching agreements, or at least the necessary numbers, ‘in extremis’. He is thus expected to read a speech lasting an hour and a half.

To achieve this, he has not hesitated to try to contact different political parties, including the PSOE. Feijóo and other party leaders, such as Juanma Moreno or Cuca Gamarra, have approached the socialists on many occasions to convince them to vote for the popular candidate if they do not accept Sánchez’s premises for reaching an agreement. Given this circumstance, the Socialist Party has moved to implement a kind of ‘anti-transfer plan’: they force their deputies to sleep in Madrid before the investiture.

Thus, if nothing changes, the acting President of the Government remains waiting for Feijóo’s failure to try his own. The numbers do seem to add up to the general secretary of the PSOE. This is, at least, what emerges from his latest statements, in which he takes the renewal of the coalition for granted, but avoids expressing himself about the conditions to achieve it, such as that amnesty so demanded by the independentists for those convicted by the ‘procés’.

At this point, former president Carles Puigdemont seems to play a key role, considering how he has been expressing himself about the sums and pacts that Sánchez is trying to obtain more than half of the votes in Congress. “Four years after Operation Judas, the only response we expect from the Spanish State is the end of repression and total amnesty,” he indicated on social networks. Everything indicates that, if he grants this measure, he would achieve the support of parties like ERC or Junts, the latter being key to revalidating his position as president.