The stopwatch will start next Wednesday. At the moment the first vote is taken for the investiture of the candidate Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the two-month period for Congress to elect the new president of the government will begin to run. Once that period has expired without white smoke, new elections would be called for January 14.
The stopwatch starts with the candidate for the presidency of the government in opposition mode, something never seen before in Spain. Today he is holding a rally in Madrid to denounce his opponent, while appealing to socialist deputies to break party discipline in the two votes that will take place this coming week. Public calls for transfuguism two days before the investiture debate. Another novelty in Spanish politics.
In the first vote (Wednesday, the 27th) an absolute majority is necessary. In the second (Friday, the 29th) a simple majority would suffice: more votes in favor than against. At this time, the Popular Party candidate does not have the numbers. He has 172 sure votes and an opposing front of 178 is emerging.
To ensure victory, Feijóo would have to have the favorable vote of four socialist deputies next Friday, or the abstention of seven socialists, which would only be possible with a serious organic fracture in the PSOE. The abstention of the Basque Nationalist Party (five deputies) seems completely impossible after the visit of Andoni Ortuzar, president of the Euzkadi Buru Batzar, to Carles Puigdemont last week in Waterloo.
There is currently no organic fracture in the PSOE, but there is a groundswell due to the high-vibration criticisms that Felipe González, Alfonso Guerra and other former leaders have been making, prominent names that do not encompass the entire old guard of the party, where there is also notable support for Pedro Sánchez, among them, the former minister José María Maravall, the main intellectual inspiration of the Socialist Party in the eighties. Former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is currently Sánchez's strongest support. Joaquín Almunia, general secretary between 1997 and 2000, remains in a cautious background.
There is no organic fracture in the PSOE, a party that today has an electoral loyalty of 87.7%, according to the CIS barometer for the month of September. The CIS polls are once again being read with respect after having been very close to the results of the last general elections, compared to the opposite diagnosis of the majority of polls carried out by private companies. Today the PSOE would be in a position to win a general election. González y Guerra's offensive does not seek an immediate organic crisis. It is a position taking thinking about the coming months.
Feijóo was proposed as a candidate by the King on August 22. The month of waiting has seemed long. He asked for time and the president of Congress granted it, among other reasons because it was necessary to organize the calendar so that the hypothetical holding of new elections did not coincide with the Christmas holidays.
Feijóo's month of waiting has had two phases. At first he sought the abstention of the PNV and sent messages in Morse alphabet to Junts per Catalunya. Future investments. What may not be now, could be in two years. At the beginning of September he discreetly interviewed Andoni Ortuzar. That meeting, kept secret, was revealed this week by the PNV. In turn, the deputy general secretary of the PP, Esteban González Pons, a person of Feijóo's greatest confidence, switched from the Morse alphabet to the Latin alphabet in communications with Junts. The first step was to give them the treatment of interlocutor: “Junts is a party whose tradition and legality are not in doubt,” said the Valencian MEP at the end of August. According to some unconfirmed journalistic information, González Pons would have met with Jordi Turull, current general secretary of Junts, at the home of a Barcelona businessman during the summer. The Madrid PP did not agree at all with that strategy and would soon make it known.
After second vice president Yolanda Díaz met with Puigdemont in Brussels at the beginning of September, former president José María Aznar ordered a stop. In an energetic intervention, Aznar tightened the sails of the Spanish right and called for a “rebellion.” From that call for a “national struggle” arose the rally that the Popular Party is holding today in Plaza Felipe II in Madrid, in the heart of the Salamanca neighborhood. First it had to be an open event, but they wanted to avoid a photo with Vox. Forced to support Aznar's call for protest, Núñez Feijóo's team is terrified of Colón's photo. Madrid's Plaza de Colón has become a cursed place for the conventional Spanish right. It brings bad luck. Every time they call there, they lose.
At today's event in Plaza Felipe II, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Madrid PP and the Community of Madrid, will speak. She couldn't be left out. A short intervention has been planned so as not to take away the prominence of the three main speakers: Feijóo, Aznar and Mariano Rajoy. New scenes of acclaim for Ayuso could weaken Feijóo two days before taking the Congress platform to present his government program.
The candidate must also decide whether to use Galician in his parliamentary consecration. It is not a minor matter, if we take into account that his countrymen (2.7 million people) are used to listening to Feijóo in Galician, since that was his preferred language during the thirteen years that he served as president of the Xunta de Galicia. . In a few months, next spring, there will be regional elections in Galicia, possibly synchronized with those in the Basque Country. The current president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, has defended this week the possibility of the Galician deputies of the PP expressing themselves in their language in Congress. Rueda is concerned that the proud affirmation of the Galician is now in the hands of the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG), the first opposition party in the Parliament located in Santiago de Compostela. For speaking Basque in the plenary session last Tuesday, Borja Sémper, another man in Feijóo's circle, has received all kinds of insults and invectives. “You have to enter Genoa with a flamethrower,” exclaimed radio player Federico Jiménez Losantos, demiurge of the "uncomplexed" right.
This same week, the PP tried to knock out Pedro Sánchez in Brussels by seeking to block the initiative for the official recognition of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European Union. The veto of a single country at the EU General Affairs Council meeting would have shelved the matter and this would have meant a hard setback for the socialist leader in his attempt to attract Junts. The European People's Party moved in that direction. The governments of Sweden and Finland expressed reluctance. Italy and Poland, too. But there was no veto. Italy was about to present it, but the Government of Giorgia Meloni, which today celebrates one year since its electoral victory, is on the high seas, with a serious problem of dialogue with France and Germany. They have not wanted to tighten the ropes with Spain. That's called European politics.
PP rally in the Salamanca neighborhood. Pedro Sánchez at the PSC Rose Festival, in Gavà, and Alderdi Eguna (Match Day) of the PNV in Foronda (Álava). Vigilant Sunday. Madrid DF is bustling.
