Yesterday, the PSOE entered Congress without a majority to be able to preside over it and, therefore, control it, and it came out with 178 supporters – an absolute majority -, a confrontational right that was not able to agreement and proclaiming Pedro Sánchez as the only candidate for a possible investiture. This is how Ferraz summarized the first major session of the political year, that of the constitution of the Lower House. The socialists, however, are cautious because the vote to elect Francina Armengol as the new third authority of the State was not decided until the discount time and does not predefine the future.
The PSOE assumes that “there is a lot of work to be done” in the coming weeks. But in Moncloa they highlighted the “good smile” that Sánchez displayed in the first major political duel of the year. The one on August 17 was an initial victory for the socialists in the conservative bloc. There are 178 supports that do not guarantee the acting President of the Central Government to emerge victorious from an investiture session, but they do give him an advantage for the next round of consultations with King Felipe VI.
More forceful was the spokesperson of the socialist parliamentary group, Patxi López. “There is only one possible president”, he proclaimed after the plenary session. “We will work for a legislature of progress” and “today we are closer to achieving it”, he added. This Thursday’s votes, the ex-lehendakari defended, were “an exercise in parliamentary realism”.
For the PSOE, it is also “good news” that Vox is not part of the Congress Bureau. They consider it, in addition, “a message for Europe”, party sources indicated.
The progressive bloc scored 39 more votes than the one led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo and, in addition, managed to open a channel of water in the conservative. The president of the PP, highlighted López, assured that he had 172 deputies and he has 139 after the first big vote in his parliamentary seat. Therefore, he concluded, “he has been unable to reach an agreement with anyone”, except UPN and CC, and “so he cannot present himself for an investiture”. Ferraz was annoyed by the “pressure” that, in his opinion, the PP has exerted on the head of state and considered that, after yesterday’s result, the possible candidacy of Feijóo would not be possible.
The PSOE was very careful not to venture what will happen in the round of consultations with the King and to maintain a scrupulous respect for the procedure laid down in the Constitution. But the socialist spokesman has already pointed out the roadmap drawn up to try to secure another majority: “Let politics be the one that solves political problems and not just justice”. The search, he concluded, of “dialogue” and “understanding” to “add”, and “not to divide”, “to integrate all identities, and not to confront them”.
But in the PSOE, not everything is good intentions in the face of a possible investiture. The president of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García Page, defined yesterday, after the votes in Congress, the scenario as “a legislature with remote control” in the hands of Puigdemont. “And the command is so remote that it is outside of Spain”, he added. He stated that the possible combinations for an investiture “have us all a little sad, not to say very worried”.
