world

2023-08-17 14:07:52

The outgoing Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, won his bet on Thursday during the opening of the parliamentary session, by having the Socialist candidate, Francina Armengol, elected as President of the Assembly, thanks to a last-minute agreement with the party representing the hard wing of Catalan separatism.

Ms. Armengol, 52, won 178 votes in the first round, two more than the majority required, thanks to the votes of the seven deputies of Junts per Catalunya (JxCat, Together for Catalonia), the party led by the independence leader Carles Puigdemont, exiled in Belgium and wanted by Spanish justice since the failure in 2017 of an attempt to secede from Catalonia.

Even if it was only a first round, this agreement between the Socialist Party and Mr. Puigdemont is important, because it gives a first positive indication on the chances of Mr. Sánchez to be invested Prime Minister once more in the next few days and thus avoid new elections.

Sánchez’s horizon has indeed cleared up, especially since his rival Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the People’s Party (PP, right), who is also claiming the post of Prime Minister, experienced a resounding failure during this opening session of Parliament. Its candidate for the presidency of the Assembly, Cuca Gamarra, who hoped to obtain 172 votes and therefore thought that he might win in the event of the abstention of the deputies of Junts, finally won only 139 votes, namely those of the 137 deputies of the PP and elected representatives of two small regional parties.

The 33 deputies of Vox, a far-right party on which the PP depended, voted for their own candidate.

This division illustrates the tumultuous relations, because very ambiguous, between the PP, a center-right party, and Vox, a formation ultra ideologically close to the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the head of the Italian government Giorgia Meloni.

Since the legislative elections of July 23, which had seen the PP once once more become the country’s leading party, but far from an absolute majority, Mr. Feijóo has been demanding to be appointed to appear before the deputies in order to submit to a vote of investiture. , justifying his demand by the fact that his party is the one having had the most seats.

Sánchez had retorted to him on Wednesday that “in Spain, the one who governs is the one who obtains the most support”, in other words who can muster a majority. He also accused the PP of “putting pressure” on King Felipe VI, who is responsible for choosing the candidate for the nomination. From this point of view, Thursday’s vote showed that Mr. Feijóo did not have a majority, since even Vox failed him.

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