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Spanish lawmakers are set to decide if the country will be governed by a fragile left-wing coalition led by current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — or if voters will be sent back to the ballot box for another election.
After last month’s general election resulted in no overall winner, Sánchez will face a vital first test on Thursday as he seeks to find a way to remain in power.
Although he has apparently succeeded in winning the support of a vast array of leftist and separatist parties, the socialist politician still doesn’t have the numbers needed to form a government: He requires at least a few MPs belonging to the Catalan independence Junts party to back his candidacy in parliament if he is to remain in office.
That’s bad news for Sánchez, because Junts’ de facto leader, the self-exiled former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, is demanding the socialists make seemingly impossible concessions in exchange for his party’s support.
If Junts’ MPs don’t give Sánchez their backing, Spain will be heading for a new election at the end of this year or early in 2024.
On Thursday the country will get a preview of what lies ahead when the Spanish parliament reconvenes and lawmakers set about electing a president and the eight deputies and secretaries who together make up the body’s ruling bureau.
Last month’s national vote resulted in a tie between Spain’s left-wing and right-wing blocs, with each side controlling 171 seats in the 350-seat chamber. For either the right or Sánchez’s left-wing bloc to secure the presidency, they’ll need to win over the Canarian Coalition’s single MP and at least some of the seven lawmakers representing Junts, whose lawmakers won’t even meet to discuss the issue until Thursday morning.
“As decisive days approach … the tension grows and the bids in the auction increase,” Puigdemont tweeted on Monday. “Patience, perseverance and perspective.”
Although the parliament’s bureau may seem like a mere administrative body, the nine lawmakers who are members wield enormous power: They control the body’s budget, approve the creation of parliamentary groups, authorize investigative commissions, and ultimately determine which bills are taken up by MPs.
Sánchez’s Socialist Party is determined to secure the presidency of the parliament and to that end on Tuesday it announced that its candidate for the post would be Francina Armengol, the former regional president of the Balearic Islands.
Armengol is a Catalan speaker who led coalition administrations that included regionalist political parties, and her selection is widely seen as a nod to the separatists whose support Sánchez needs if he is to remain in office.
But her selection appears to have done little to sway Puigdemont. He maintains that the price for his party’s support — for both the presidency and Spain’s premiership — is an amnesty for everyone implicated in the failed 2017 Catalan independence referendum, as well as consent from Madrid to hold a new self-determination vote.
Last-minute pressure
Sánchez’s socialists have already said that both demands are out of the question because they fall foul of the country’s constitution. But their negotiators have spent the past weeks desperately trying to forge some other sort of deal with Junts’ MPs.
In a tweet on Wednesday, Puigdemont said those efforts had been in vain. “The cardinal points of our position have not changed, no matter how many last-minute pressures there may be,” he said.
If Junts declines to back Armengol and instead allows a right-wing candidate to preside over the parliament, it will almost certainly mean that Sánchez will not be able to get the party’s backing to form a government and that Spain will be forced to hold new elections.
Gaining control of the presidency of the parliament and its bureau would be a major victory for Spain’s right-wing parties and a face-saving reprieve for Alberto Núñez Feijóo. His center-right Popular Party won the most votes in last month’s national elections but failed to secure the number of seats needed to form a government.
The conservative leader has no chance of becoming the country’s next prime minister, but he is intent on having Spanish King Felipe VI name him as his candidate so as to be able to make his case to parliament.
That would at least allow Feijóo to remain relevant and keep his rivals within the Popular Party at bay.
A scenario in which Feijóo is permitted to make a failed bid to form a government would give the conservatives a chance to influence when Spaniards will be called back to the polls.
Spain’s constitution dictates that if no candidate can secure the support of a simple majority of lawmakers, parliament must be dissolved two months after the first failed vote takes place, and elections must be held 54 days after that date.
Given that Feijóo wants to make his case to the parliament this month, that would mean that if Sánchez fails to secure the required support for his own bid to form a government, new elections would be held around Christmas.
Experts say the conservatives may be angling for that eventuality in the hope that the turnout for the holiday vote will be low and ultimately favor their candidates.
