It won’t be the first failed investment. Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez know what it is to lose the vote to be president and they were only after repeating the elections. What makes the one of the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, different next week is that there is another candidate with the possibility of governing, Pedro Sánchez, who is not the one who will defend his project in this investiture. It will be done by Feijóo, who won the elections and who currently has more support than the leader of the PSOE, 172 after having obtained those of Vox, UPN and Coalició Canària, but they are four less than necessary.
The general secretary of the PSOE is reserved. Although in order to reach the magic number he has to agree with Sumar, ERC, Junts, the PNB, Bildu and the BNG, Sánchez is optimistic and assures that he will get the supports, despite the conditions imposed by former president Carles Puigdemont.
With this panorama, the debate that begins on Tuesday is seen as a choice between two blocs and, therefore, between two candidates. Not voting for Feijóo is voting for Sánchez, and not agreeing with what, it seems, the incumbent president is willing to concede is voting for Feijóo. The result of the vote will not only lead to the failure of the popular candidate, but it will be the realization that the PSOE candidate has the possibility to govern in the future.
For this reason, the program proposed by Feijóo will be of little relevance, because it will not become a government action. The six major pacts that he will put on the table, so that they focus on the management of a single government – regeneration pact, for the welfare state, for economic sanitation, for families, national water pact and pact territorial – they will not come true, and they have been on the back burner for weeks.
The popular leader lacks four votes and in a last attempt to get them, calls are proliferating to some socialist deputies – four is enough – to break the voting discipline. The last to do so was the Andalusian president, Juanma Moreno, who yesterday asked PSOE MPs to “rebel, for their principles”, to support Feijóo. Cuca Gamarra did the same, with the argument that “amnesty is to kneel before the pro-independence”.
amnesty This word belongs to Sánchez’s investiture, but it will focus the debate on Feijóo’s. He himself has made this term head the political debate denouncing the socialist’s intentions to be president. In this way, he recognizes that his candidacy will not succeed, or perhaps he does it as a last ditch effort so that the internal discrepancies within the PSOE on the amnesty will provide him with the four votes he needs.
The long month that Feijóo has had to wait for his investiture, to prevent a repeat election falling during the Christmas holidays, has made clear the impossibility of the popular leader to achieve more agreements. But the remoteness of the date, his appearance, prevented him from being in opposition, since he is the candidate for the investiture.
This, they assure the leadership of the PP, will be from Friday, when the second vote will take place, although there are those who consider, in the PP, that there is still time, what remains until Pedro Sánchez negotiates with Puigdemont and the rest of the parties and be re-elected president. Until then, the threat of an electoral repeat that gives Alberto Núñez Feijóo the four deputies he needs will remain alive. If there is none, the PP will activate the Senate and its 137 deputies in Congress to oppose and not make things easy for the PSOE.
