The economist Ramón Tamames, former deputy of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and one of the founders of Izquierda Unida (IU) and former member of the Democratic and Social Center (CDS), met today with Santiago Abascal, president of Vox, to discuss a possible motion of censure against President Pedro Sánchez. The meeting feeds the options of Tamames, 89, to lead this motion, since Vox established that the candidate should be independent.
As Abascal explained in a tweet, this is not the first time they have seen each other. The conclusion they have reached - says the extreme right-wing leader - is that the situation that Spain is going through "requires a deep reflection by the representatives of national sovereignty." Abascal has made explicit that one of the options to take into account is the mechanism of motion of censure. In this way, they have been summoned to "continue with the conversations".
The president of Vox already announced in December his party's intention to raise a new motion of no confidence. It would be the second of the legislature, after which he presented the same formation and which ended in failure due to lack of support beyond his own parliamentary group. In this case, the idea is that the candidate is independent, that he has government experience and that he call elections immediately. Despite the fact that Abascal questioned the Popular Party to endorse the proposal, Alberto Núñez Feijóo ruled it out.
The meeting this morning of the Vox leader confirms that one of the options on the table to lead this candidacy against the Executive of Pedro Sánchez is Ramón Tamames.
The economist, born in Madrid in 1933, was a member of the Communist Party during the Franco dictatorship and even became part of the leadership. He had two brief experiences in jail, one in the 1950s for participating in a student congress (he was an active militant at the university), and another in the 1970s for his contribution to the opposition organization Coordinación Democrática ('Platajunta'). to the regime.
Throughout the transition, and until 1982, he was a deputy in Congress in the communist ranks. At the same time, he served as first deputy mayor in the Madrid City Council, which made him the right hand of the then head of the consistory, Enrique Tierno Galván.
Later, he left the PCE and founded the Progressive Confederation, with which he helped create the United Left in 1986. From then until 1989 he represented the party in the Lower House.
That same year, when he had not yet left his seat, he jumped to the Democratic and Social Center, but his time in the party founded by Adolfo Suárez was brief and he ended up retiring from politics. Since then he has dedicated himself to his professional career, focused on economics and academic works. Among them stands out the manual Economic Structure of Spain.
Over the years, in the economic sphere, he has been turning towards conservative theses, as he himself has recognized, far from what the PCE defended in Congress while he was a deputy. Decades later, he has qualified his position at the time, going so far as to ensure that he was part of the PCE to achieve a democratic Constitution and because it was a space for anti-Franco struggle. As Tamames has explained on several occasions, there are issues on which he has not changed his mind, such as his animosity towards the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat.
Regarding Catalonia, Tamames said at the time that the State should have applied article 155 of the Constitution already in 2015, when the so-called plebiscite elections took place and from there a clearly pro-independence Government resulted with Carles Puigdemont at the helm.
