There have been no surprises. The result of the candidate’s first investiture vote popular, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has been the expected one. 172 if it is against 178 noes. The road to failure is paved. The leader of the PP will not obtain the confidence of the Chamber. On Friday, when the second and final scrutiny takes place, Congress’s position will be ratified. It will be very little, four votes, but enough – just one difference would be enough – to overthrow his aspiration to reach the Government.
The failure, however, has not made a dent in Feijóo’s leadership at the head of one of the two blocks into which Parliament is divided. A bloc that, with four seats left, occupies half of the Chamber. He popular will lose the investiture – in fact he himself took it for granted – but he has established himself as the standard-bearer of the scourge to a rival, Pedro Sánchez, who has preferred to avoid the debate so as not to have to reveal the amount of the bill that he will pay to independentists and abertzales in exchange for his investiture.
“This debate has been worth it,” the PP candidate said today at the end of the session, “because we have all portrayed ourselves, with words and with silences” and because it has become clear that “there is an alternative.” . “I,” he stressed, “will emerge from this debate with my principles and those of eleven million voters, intact.”
Starting Friday, when the House confirms the candidate’s failed claim popularthe time of a new candidate will begin to run, Pedro Sanchez. The same one who assured that he would never make an agreement with Bildu, that the amnesty did not fit into the Constitution and that those who carried out the attempted process They “very clearly” committed a crime of “rebellion.” Now its reissue in The Moncloa It depends on all of them: ERC, Junts and Bildu. Also from the PNV, a formation that, depending on convenience, bets either on the left or on the right.
What is foreseeable is that Felipe VI will without wasting time open a new round of contacts with the parties that sit in Congress to make a second designation of a candidate for the investiture. It is also true that neither the Catalan secessionists nor the abertzales Basques. The head of state will have to trust Sánchez’s word when he assures him that he has the support of all of them to be inaugurated. Without that support, the socialist’s guaranteed votes would fall very short.