The motion of no confidence against Sánchez will be held next week: between March 21 and 23

2023-03-13T10:42:05.576Z

The president of Congress will communicate the date this Monday and will start the procedure. The Government wants to take advantage of the appointment to link the PP with Vox before the elections

The Government has decided to address Vox's new motion of no confidence as soon as possible, at a particularly sensitive moment for Spanish politics, at the gates of the decisive regional and municipal elections on May 28.

The debate will be held next week: it will start on Tuesday, March 21, continue on the 22nd and culminate with the vote that same 22nd or already on the 23rd, according to what parliamentary and government sources have confirmed to EL PAÍS.

The president of the Congress, Meritxell Batet, will formally communicate this Monday to the president of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez;

the candidate, the veteran economist Ramón Tamames;

and the proponent group, Vox.

On Tuesday, Batet will transfer her decision to the Board and the Board of Spokespersons of Congress.

The motion is doomed to failure because it does not have support, but the Government gives that appointment,

Vox registered its second motion of censure against Sánchez on February 27, almost three months after announcing it and waiting unsuccessfully for the opposition leader, the popular Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to lead it, and later for some another game.

After searching and testing various independent applicants, 89-year-old professor Ramón Tamames agreed to be a candidate, and the debate will take place over two or three days: between March 21 and 23.

The Presidency and the Bureau will have to resolve some technical and logistical aspects that have been being studied for days, such as the location of the candidate himself, who is 89 years old and in this type of debate, very long and full of interventions, will have a very leading role.

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The motion will take place, therefore, between 23 and 24 days after your petition has been registered, in a similar sequence to previous ones.

The precedent signed and defended by the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, took 21 days to materialize.

The one signed two legislatures ago without success by the then leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, took place 25 days later.

Pedro Sánchez already had very limited dates due to his international agenda, which is especially intense in these months of preparation for the Spanish presidency of the EU, which will begin on July 1.

The president has planned five European mini-tours and has already carried out two.

The third trip will take place precisely in the week of March 20-26, which was already full of milestones.

The president plans to travel to Luxembourg and Belgium in those days, which will probably coincide with the EU summit in Brussels between March 23 and 24, just after the motion of no confidence.

That same 24 he will leave for Santo Domingo, where the Ibero-American summit is scheduled with the presence of Felipe VI and several Ibero-American presidents.

Moncloa and the Presidency of Congress ruled out rushing the discussion of the motion for this week, because it was also already very complicated.

Sánchez and several members of the Government have a Spanish-Portuguese summit in Lanzarote on the 14th and 15th. And in the coming days it is more than possible that the replacement of two ministers who are going to be candidates in the municipal elections will be announced: Reyes Maroto (Industry) and Carolina Darias (Health).

The president's hard core assures that it will be a mini-crisis to relieve only those two ministers and that he will not go further with profound changes.

The motion will stay that way for the following week.

The president and his team considered that taking the debate further, to the beginning of April and already in the middle of Easter, would be stretching the matter too far, and that the citizens would not understand it.

The motion, in any case, is doomed to failure, because for now it only has the explicit support of the 52 Vox deputies.

The PP, on this occasion, has announced that it will abstain, compared to what the previous leader of the popular, Pablo Casado, did, who voted against it after a debate in which he described his abrupt break with Abascal.

Without obligation

It is practically certain that Pedro Sánchez will intervene in the debate —although he is not obliged to do so— and will take advantage of the meeting to try to show citizens the two possible models of Government after the next elections: that of the progressive coalition of the PSOE and United We Can , with the support of various nationalist and pro-independence groups and, opposite, that of the right-wing block of the PP and the extreme right of Vox.

The intention of La Moncloa is to link this motion with the PP as much as possible, although Alberto Núñez Feijóo tries to flee from that association and will not even be present in the chamber as a guest.

The PP's decision to abstain and not vote against, something discussed even within Feijóo's party, has given wings to the Government to rule that the head of the opposition is closer to the extreme right than Pablo Casado was.

In reality, Feijóo seems to want to avoid giving any relevance to this motion, but in La Moncloa they will try to achieve the opposite effect.

The motion will also serve to try to reunify the majority group and the progressive coalition itself against the extreme right, after the very strong tensions that have been experienced around the vote on the sexual freedom law or the only

yes is yes

After the motion, and after Holy Week, the country's political panorama will be turned upside down in the local elections of 28-M, for this reason, in the two days of debate, the campaign axes of all the groups will be glimpsed.

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