The investiture bloc groups around the PSOE and Unidas Podemos have started informal talks to weigh a joint strategy in plenary session of Vox’s motion of no confidence, to make ex-communist Ramón Tamames president, which could go through gaslighting him avoiding answering him or doing it with a discreet profile. As reported by El Confidencial yesterday and confirmed by parliamentary sources, this dialogue, informal and still very precarious, has been of interest to Esquerra Republicana, although the response received so far is very vague, not so much because of the substance but because of the calendar.
The motion, if the Vox parliamentary group keeps its word, will be registered today in the Congress of Deputies and will not be qualified by the Congress table, at the earliest, until Tuesday of next week, March 7. However, the date on which the plenary session is held remains completely open because it is up to the presidency of Congress alone to set it. The only condition imposed by the regulation is that it do so before the end of the current session, that is, Meritxell Batet has until July to make a decision on the matter.
In this sense, the parliamentary groups believe that it is still too early to start discussing joint strategies, although those who make up the majority of the investiture all agree that agreeing on a coordinated response against the ultra-right would be desirable throughout the election year. It comes loaded as a duel between progressive politics and conservative and reactionary ones.
To the Socialists, on the other hand, it does not seem so obvious that ignoring Vox’s motion and ignoring the projected candidate, Ramón Tamames, is the most appropriate idea in tactical and electoral terms – which, after all, are the ones that inspire the initiative of the extreme right–, since the main victim of the Vox motion, registered to recover ground before the PP, is Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who also cannot intervene in plenary session because he is not a deputy.
For the PP, Vox’s motion of no confidence is inconvenient, given that its main objective for the election year is to regain ground from the ultra-right once it is already taken for granted that it will absorb the majority of the Ciudadanos electorate, and that the that he does not return to the mother ship will not be to lean towards the socialists, but precisely towards the extreme right. In addition, the motion of no confidence could interrupt the opposition discourse that the popular ones are currently deploying, consisting of underlining the problems of the coalition government with the law of only yes is yes, and the dissent regarding the defense of Ukraine. That is, to put the coalition in front of its contradictions.
In this sense, a unitary response from the investiture groups to a motion of no confidence that seeks to overthrow the Executive and replace it with a candidate proposed by the extreme right, creates a polarization that displaces the PP and its candidate. Hence, the Socialists have nothing clear about deafening the Vox initiative, disregarding their candidate –every time there is no possibility that it will be approved–, basically it is doing their main adversary a favor. And with ten months to go before the generals, throwing in a lifeline doesn’t seem like the smartest strategy.
