Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the People’s Party (PP) was finally chosen by the King of Spain, Felipe VI, on Tuesday August 22. The leader of the right will thus try to be invested Prime Minister by the deputies, announced the president of the Assembly, although he does not have the required majority for the moment.
The king communicated “his decision to propose Mr. Alberto Núñez Feijóo as candidate for the presidency of the government”, declared in a press conference the socialist Francina Armengol, new president of the Congress of Deputies renewed in the elections of July 23.
It was a difficult choice for the king and the outcome is still very uncertain. Because neither Alberto Núñez Feijóo, nor Pedro sanchez, outgoing Socialist Prime Minister, has the required majority, due to the results of the early elections of July 23. For now, a date for the nomination debate remains to be set. It will be decided in the next few hours, during an exchange between Francina Armengol and Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
At the end of their respective talks with the king on Tuesday, the two candidates for the post had affirmed that they were ready to submit to a vote of investiture if the choice of the sovereign fell on them.
Felipe VI, who had started his talks on Monday, received the leader of the far-right Vox party on Tuesday morning, then Pedro Sánchez, before meeting in the afternoon with the leader of the PP.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo reiterated that he claimed the right to submit to a vote of investiture, because the PP won the highest number of seats on July 23. But he can only have a maximum of 172 votes: those of the 137 deputies of the PP, plus the 33 of Vox and the deputies of two small regional parties.
Based on this observation, Pedro Sánchez believes that Alberto Núñez Feijóo has no chance and has long considered that appointing him to appear before the deputies was a waste of time.
However, he said on Tuesday, after his audience with the king, that he would have no objection if Felipe VI named his opponent. “Whatever decision the head of state takes, it will have the support of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party,” he said at a press conference ahead of the announcement of the king’s decision, while repeating that an investiture vote by the leader of the PP would be “a failure”. “There is no other alternative than a government of progress”, he said, that is to say a renewal of the outgoing coalition between the socialists and the radical left.
It is this majority that Pedro Sánchez hopes to muster in a hypothetical investiture vote if Alberto Núñez Feijóo fails, but at present it does not exist and the incumbent Prime Minister can only count on 164 votes.
ERC and especially Junts have, indeed, underlined last week that a vote of nomination would require new negotiations for which they have set the bar very high. Their two main demands are for a referendum on self-determination and amnesty for all those charged after Catalonia’s failed 2017 secession attempt that forced Carles Puigdemont to flee to Belgium to escape Spanish justice.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo claimed to be “only four votes away from an absolute majority”, while Pedro Sánchez, he said, “is within reach of an amnesty” and “an independence referendum”.