Tag Archives: PP

SPAIN

Political Maneuvering and Negotiations Surrounding Feijóo’s Government Formation Efforts

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The King’s commission to Alberto Núñez Feijóo to try to form a government not only activates the electoral counter.

It also limits to one month the term that the PP leader has to seek the four supports that he lacks to save a sufficient majority that will take him to Moncloa. It is not an easy task.

In fact, it is “almost impossible”, according to important party leaders. But Feijóo, they say in the national leadership of the party, must “fight until the end” and seek the votes, if necessary, from under the stones.

The popular leader is already putting together his contact agenda, which he will launch starting next week.

One of the clear and primary objectives that they contemplate in Genoa is to invite the acting head of the Executive to a formal meeting with the candidate for the investiture. Go or not, they understand in the PP, the offer is intended to show who was “the winner of the elections” and who was “the loser”.

The party has no hope that Sánchez will accept Feijóo’s outstretched hand in any way to allow a government in the minority of the most voted list, the proposal that the popular leader defended over and over again during the electoral campaign.

The popular ones assume that the socialist leader maneuvers in parallel to tie his own parliamentary majority, with the help of nationalists and independentistas.

This Wednesday, without going any further, both Sumar and the PSOE have assigned two deputies each to ERC and Junts so that they have their own group in the Lower House.

But the PP still harbors some hope. Genoa celebrates that Francina Armengol has given in to her proposal to delay the investiture session to September 26 and 27, and they reiterate that if they already considered the vote lost, they would have asked to end a debate as soon as possible in the last week of August to force elections before Christmas.

It was the initial roadmap, but the PP has recovered some optimism after achieving the King’s order. “We have to negotiate. Everything is possible”, reiterated a senior official from Genoa. “You have to be patient, because politics changes a lot. It is difficult, but not impossible”, adds a regional baron.

What is also taken for granted in the party is that Feijóo will try to find possible internal fissures in the ranks of the Socialists and will look for leaders who are critical of Sánchez’s strategy and his alliance with Puigdemont, on whom it depends entirely to re-edit the coalition. of government.

Already in the campaign, the leader of the PP advanced that, if he won the elections, he would call the PSOE barons to put pressure on Sánchez and for him to abstain from his investiture.

This scenario is discarded, but not the option of attracting possible disscolos, but not facing Feijóo’s investiture, but dynamiting a possible intention of the socialist candidate in Congress if he ties himself to Junts and ERC.

Especially if the payment is amnesty, as the Executive already values, or new steps towards Catalan self-determination.

Feijóo starts the round of contacts with a total of 172 supports in his pocket, his own 137 plus Vox’s 33 and the two from UPN and Coalición Canaria. An important majority that, however, is overshadowed by the majority of noes that it continues to have in the Lower House. Sánchez’s block seems impregnable.

But the leader of the PP will make a desperate attempt to attract the PNV, which has already denied Feijóo up to five times. Those of Ortuzar do contemplate a “courtesy” meeting with the investiture candidate, but they insist that they will not facilitate a PP government.

At this point, the PP will focus its dialogue with the jeltzales on the economic level, and will try to tempt them with more “financing” and “investments”, without ruling out a new Basque quota. Feijóo already demonstrated at the beginning of the year his commitment to the specificity of the tax system and the autonomy of the Basque Country when he distanced himself from Ciudadanos and Vox in the Senate and joined his votes to PSOE and PNV to process through the emergency route, without going through by commission or admit amendments, the updating of the quota and Basque concert.

It was one more gesture in his attempt to rebuild the bridges with the nationalists. But, for now, it has not managed to open cracks in the alliance between the PNV and Sánchez.

The popular ones also allude to the “responsibility” of those from Ortuzar to operate in an “intelligent” way within the framework of the investiture and mark distances with a block in which Bildu “is eating it by the feet”.

The proximity of the Basque elections reduces the margin for the PNV to get out of the pot and position itself in an equation in which, in addition, Vox is found.

But the popular leader could play one last trick with the jeltzales: not demand their yes to Feijóo’s investiture, but, at least, agree that they will not facilitate Sánchez’s either..

Together, valid interlocutor

The PP will only exclude EH Bildu from its round of contacts. But he will speak with the rest of the parliamentary forces, including the ERC or Junts. It is a strategic turn of Feijóo that denotes a certain anguish for not staying at the gates of Moncloa.

Just a few weeks ago, different spokespersons based in Genoa publicly denied that the PP was going to sit with the party of Carles Puigdemont, a “fugitive from Justice” and a “coup plotter” whose initials are “outside the Constitution”.

But the frame seems to have changed. So much so that the institutional deputy secretary, Esteban González Pons, minimized the process of “four people, five or 10” and justified his intention to call Junts in that it is a party “whose tradition and legality are not in doubt”. The goal is an abstention. The limits, they insist, continue to be in the Constitution.

SPAIN

Murcia’s Political Landscape: Complex Relations Between PP and Vox Amid Electoral Uncertainty

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They have known for months in the Region of Murcia that what happens in national politics has an echo in territorial negotiations. That the 28-M outlined a panorama, the 23-J another and the difficult constitutive session in Congress for the right, this Thursday, another. And that all this directly affects the relationship between the Popular Party and Vox in Murcia, where the drums of the electoral repetition sound increasingly close.

The week has been tough for the forces that make up the ideological spectrum of the right. Alberto Núñez Feijóo entered the Lower House for the first time on Thursday as leader of the popular deputies and hoped to achieve a minimum of 171 support to make Cuca Gamarra president of Congress.

By controlling the two chambers, the PP would take a giant step in its objective of being in charge of forming the Government. He came out with just 139 votes after denying Vox a seat on the Board, which resulted in a resounding break with those of Santiago Abascal.

Now, despite the fact that in Vox they rule out that this distancing could affect support for a hypothetical investiture of Feijóo, the complex relationship between both forces can mark the political future of the coming weeks.

Not only at the national level: the Region of Murcia is the only autonomy still mired in the blockade and without forming a government, and precisely the PP and Vox are the leading actors in this delicate situation.

The deadline to extend the negotiations, which are already approaching 90 days with hardly any progress, ends on September 7. However, there are more and more voices that see the situation between the two parties as irresolvable and assume that it will not be necessary to reach that date to assume that the people of Murcia will have to go to the polls again.

Encounter

The clash between Feijóo and Abascal this week, in fact, ended up truncating the little hope that existed in the Murcian negotiating teams of reaching an agreement. In the environment of Fernando López Miras, as the days go by they are closer to the idea of electoral repetition.

Even other territorial barons of the PP advise him to return to the polls. If he does, the leader of the PP will aspire to achieve an absolute majority that on this occasion has been close to. The internal calculations that it manages thus affirm it.

In addition, Genoa’s national strategy involves putting land in the middle with Vox. EL MUNDO told it this Saturday: Feijóo has transferred to his barons the slogan of “not giving up a single one” with those of Abascal to approach positions with the PNV in the coming weeks in the face of a hypothetical investiture.

And the Region of Murcia, as the only point where the negotiations are still in the air, has therefore become a more than important enclave to execute Feijóo’s plan. In other words, the national leadership of the PP is committed to López Miras’s relationship with Vox being more similar to that of his neighbor to the south, Juanma Moreno, than to that of his neighbor to the east, Carlos Mazón.

However, the last word will be the Murcian leader. In Vox they accuse him precisely of being the main architect of the blockade and of taking more than a month without contacting the regional leader of the party, José Ángel Antelo.

This week, Antelo highlighted the outstretched hand of Vox in the face of the formation of a government that puts an end to almost three months of uncertainty, but the PP refuses to allow Vox entry into its Executive and wants to govern alone.

By having 21 of the 45 seats in the regional Chamber, he needs two of the nine Vox parliamentarians, who demand two councils from the future cabinet. An excessive demand for the PP, which is convinced that if it returns to the polls it will achieve the long-awaited absolute majority.

The next few days will be decisive to know the future of Murcia. In Vox they believe that the PP will seek to blame them if the electoral repetition is finally confirmed, but they are aware of the damage they can suffer at the polls given the setback that was evidenced on 23-J.

At the national level, this feeling exists and was confirmed this week by the Vox leadership, which ruled out withdrawing its support for the PP despite the unfair maneuver in Congress and said “not to throw in the towel” in its efforts to form a government of right to stop the “national destruction” led by Pedro Sánchez.

If there is electoral repetition both in Murcia and at a general level -a scenario that cannot be ruled out-, the elections in the Region would arrive before the national ones. This would redouble the pressure on the PP and Vox in this autonomy, which would become the testing ground for two parties destined today to understand each other if they want to govern in Spain, but whose relationship seems increasingly hurt after what happened in recent days in The congress.

SPAIN

Political Tensions and Intrigues Surrounding Spanish Congress Formation

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The tension in the block on the right skyrockets. The PP’s decision to leave Vox out of the Congress Table has raised blisters in Abascal’s party, which now leaves free support for Feijóo up in the air in the face of a hypothetical investiture.

The order of the ultra-conservative party further complicates, if possible, the round of consultations between the popular leader and the King and minimizes the chances that he may be commissioned by Felipe VI to try to form a government as the winner of the 23-J elections.

At this moment, Feijóo only has 139 votes in favour, his own plus that of UPN and CC. Sánchez has just signed a majority of 178 deputies, although his partners have also warned that what happened at the Table does not presuppose that they will support an investiture of the socialist candidate.

“We want explanations”, Abascal warned after the constitutive session of the Cortes. “We are somewhat perplexed because it does not seem that preventing the third political force in Spain from staying out of Congress is recovering democratic normality,” he added..

The Vox leader has assured that, at this moment, he cannot answer the question of whether he will continue to support Feijóo without consideration in case he goes to an investiture session, and that he hopes to speak with Genoa in the short term.

Feijóo has been the most affected of the vote this Thursday. The PP has not managed to tie up even the 33 Vox supports for the Presidency of the Chamber. The ultra-conservative party has voted for its own candidate, Ignacio Gil Lázaro, in protest at Genoa’s decision not to cede one of its four positions on the Board to those of Abascal.

This same Wednesday, the leader of the PP boasted of having tied up 172 yeses. But reality has prevailed and has dealt a hard blow to Feijóo, for whom the attempt to force an investiture with his sights set on an electoral repetition is complicated..

The XV legislature has started with an agreement in extremis between Sánchez and the Catalan independence movement, which has allowed the PSOE to save the first match point against the PP and that the socialist Francina Armengol is the one who presides over the Congress with 178 votes in favor against the 139 that the PP candidate, Cuca Gamarra, has achieved, plus the vote in favor of UPN and the Canary Coalition.

Finally, PSOE and Sumar will have the majority in the body that governs the Lower House, since the former Balearic president is the one who breaks the tie between the socialists and their Sumar partners and the popular ones, with four seats each.

The break between PP and Vox has also had consequences for the distribution of the four vice-presidencies. The first is also retained by the PSOE, with Alfonso Rodríguez de Celis at the helm and 113 votes.

The second will be occupied by the popular José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro, who obtained 73 supports in the first vote. Esther Gil (Sumar) breaks the tie with Marta González (PP) in the second vote and takes the third vice presidency, so the PP retains fourth place.

The popular ones consummate, therefore, their decision not to cede one of their positions to Vox, and Ignacio Gil Lázaro loses his seat as fourth vice president of the Table.

The PNV option

The votes made it clear that the possibility of the PNV returning to the body that controls the Lower House did not come to pass. The idea launched by the PP, in an attempt to wrest the majority of the Mesa from socialists and leftists, has been shipwrecked.

Much further has been the possibility launched by the Canary Coalition to give the jeltzales the Presidency of Congress. Aitor Esteban’s party did not publicly pronounce on this possibility, which was contemplated by Sánchez’s investiture partners, but which did not sound good in the PSOE. Finally, the nationalists have come in unity of action with the socialists in this inaugural vote before reopening the melon of the investiture.

The distribution of the secretariats varied with respect to that of the vice-presidencies, since the PSOE agreed with Sumar and the rest of its allies that the first seat will be for Gerardo Pisarello, a member of Yolanda Díaz’s coalition, but coming from the commons of Ada Colau.

Pisarello received 101 votes to the 77 of the socialist Isaura Leal, who will be second secretary after leaving the leadership of the socialist group. His experience and knowledge of the Chamber is behind the election of the PSOE.

The third and fourth secretariats will belong to the popular Guillermo Mariscal and Carmen Navarro, who was already on the Board after replacing Adolfo Súarez Illana when he left politics. The PP did not want to leave a position to Vox here either, which has re-introduced Ignacio Gil Lázaro for the third consecutive vote.

The control body of the Lower House returns to that imperfect bipartisanship that has, on one side, the PSOE and Sumar, and, on the other, the PP alone after its clash with Vox. At the end of the voting, the newly elected Board has taken its seats and the new president, Francina Armengol, has launched the process of compliance with the position of the 350 deputies.