The counting of the votes of Spanish voters abroad, completed on Saturday July 29, gave the Popular Party (PP, right) a seat for the constituency of Madrid initially allocated to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party PSOE. Although the latter remains the favorite to form a government, the new balance of power makes the situation more complicated, the two formations being far from the 176 seats necessary to obtain an absolute majority in Parliament in the first round.
With the support available to both parties, the balance of power now stands at 171 deputies for the left and 171 for the right, after a small party, Coalicion Canaria, announced that it would not support at the PP.
This means that Pedro Sanchez, the outgoing Socialist Prime Minister, will need the votes of the seven deputies of the Catalan independence party Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) led by Carles Puigdemont, who took refuge in Belgium after the failed attempt at Catalan independence in 2017, to obtain the nomination in the second round by simple majority. Mr. Puigdemont conditioned his vote for Mr. Sanchez on the negotiation of a resolution of the “conflict between Catalonia and Spain”, while asking that the negotiations take place without “pressure”.
A scheduled meeting between the two candidates
Conservative Alberto Nuñez Feijoo offered Pedro Sanchez a meeting “this week” to avoid “an ungovernable situation” and “as the winner of the July 23 elections”, but the outgoing Prime Minister replied that there was no was arranged only after the installation of the new Parliament on August 17.
The People’s Party came first in the legislative elections in Spain, without obtaining the number of seats necessary to form a government. If neither bloc obtains a majority to form a government, Spain will have to hold new elections, probably at the end of the year, as was the case in the two previous general elections, in 2016 and 2019.
“Spain does not deserve an ungovernable situation and we cannot afford a blockade at such an important time for our economy and our institutions, in the midst of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union,” insisted Mr. Feijoo in a message on the social network Twitter, renamed X.
In addition, the PSOE has demanded a verification of more than 30,000 invalid votes from voters abroad, in the hope of recovering the seat that the PP took from it. A request refused by the Electoral Commission, which considered, in a resolution published by the PP on X, that there were no signs of “possible irregularities”.
