Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP and winner of the 23-J elections with 8,091,082 votes, goes to Congress this Tuesday, more than to request the confidence of the Chamber and to be invested as President of the Government, with the purpose of launching a full-fledged motion of censure against Pedro Sánchez and his intention to remain in power at all costs, even though he has lost the elections in votes and seats and the bill to achieve this involves shaking the foundations of the rule of law, bursting the seams of the constitutional framework, amend the plan of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court and dynamite the principle that the law is the same for all.
This is the very high price of the votes that Sánchez lacks to ensure a new term, long or short, in La Moncloa. The price that the PP candidate is willing to pay and that today, given the uncertainty that the country is experiencing, the PP candidate will try to crudely expose black on white, with all its edges and its multiple contradictions.
Feijóo arrives at the debate encouraged by the clamor of the tens of thousands of people that he managed to summon on Sunday in Madrid against the increasingly clear plans of the socialist leader, but in Congress, unlike in the street, he will crash against a wall.
Feijóo will propose an alternative but it will not succeed. And he and his party know it, which is why what is being decided this week, more than an investiture, is a censure of what Sánchez has already done and also, preventively, of everything that is to come.
“Social majority”
However, the popular candidate will not give up on developing his future project, launching proposals, making announcements. In short, to start paving a path that sooner or later he believes will lead him to La Moncloa. His speech will be much more directed at the citizens than at those who occupy the seats in Congress, convinced as he is, they point out in the PP, that behind him is “a social majority that abhors independence blackmail and wants State pacts.”
Feijóo is missing four votes to surpass the bar, but they are impossible to get. Sánchez will manage, based on “unworthy” concessions that go beyond the limits of the Magna Carta, in the opinion of the PP, of very prominent voices of the PSOE and, according to surveys, of the majority of citizens, to bring together a wide range of people in his support. range of losing forces but sufficient to keep him in power.
In a virtual exercise of vote gouging, the socialist defends that everyone who did not support PP or Vox actually did so for him as the leader of a formula that he wants to call progressive but that would not prosper without the support of nationalist and supremacist parties of right (PNV and Junts).
Feijóo thus faces the dam that they form together with the PSOE (121 seats); Sumar (31 seats now and 500,000 votes less than those achieved in 2019 by Podemos, Más Madrid and Compromís); ERC (seven deputies currently and 407,000 fewer votes than in 2019); JxCat (seven deputies now and 134,741 fewer votes) and PNV (five deputies in this legislature and 101,641 fewer votes than four years ago).
The two exceptions on this list are, in addition to the socialists who achieved one million more votes compared to the three million that the PP gained, the BNG, which even maintaining a single seat achieved 32,730 more votes and EH Bildu, now with six deputies. and 56,843 more votes than in 2019.
Two votes
This group of formations will vote against Feijóo's investiture. 178 noes compared to 172 yeses will clip his wings in the first vote that will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, and in which the presidential candidate needs to obtain an absolute majority (176 votes). On Friday, 48 hours later, there will be a second, easier chance, in which you will only need to have more votes in favor than against, but which, at the expense of a major surprise, you will not be able to overcome either.
Feijóo, with his proposal for the equality of Spaniards, against privileging some territories over others, in favor of pacts between the two major parties and above all against impunity – via amnesty, disguised or not – of who attacked the State, cannot hope to find support among those who have built their political projects exactly on the opposite approaches.
It is not yet guaranteed that a good part of these formations – independence and nationalists – will give their support to Sánchez. It will depend on everything that the socialist candidate is willing to give up, but the forcefulness with which he anticipates that he will once again form the Government gives a solid clue that the concessions will come and they will be enormous.. The first, the amnesty of the fugitives and those prosecuted by the process although they maintain that they will do it again and that their purpose continues to be to dismember the State.
Faced with this, the popular candidate will burn one last cartridge appealing to the conscience of the socialist deputies, hammering with the arguments that have already been put on the table by those who until now were historical references of the PSOE – Felipe González, Alfonso Guerra and the most important names. prominent members of the old guard – but it will waste the gunpowder. There will be no cracks in a group that has already been warned that the discrepancy is paid for with expulsion and with the sanction of transfuguism. Feijóo's investiture will fail but the PP maintains that the censorship against Sánchez will have begun.
