The counting of the votes of Spaniards living abroad in the legislative elections on July 23 took a deputy from the Socialists, and although they remain favorites to form a government, they face a new obstacle.
At the same time, the former president of Catalonia, the pro-independence Carles Puigdemont, warned the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, on Saturday that he will only have the votes of his Junts party in an eventual investiture to renew his mandate if an agreement is reached on the Catalan "conflict" and not on his personal situation, and that the negotiation has been done without "pressure" and without practicing "political blackmail".
In a very close election, the president of the outgoing government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, now needs the seven Catalan pro-independence deputies of the Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) party, the most reluctant to support a national government, to vote in favor of his investiture, when before his abstention was enough.
The count, which began on Friday and ended on Saturday, gave the Popular Party (PP, conservatives) a seat for the Madrid constituency initially attributed to the Socialists only by 1,749 votes, a difference overcome thanks to the vote of Spaniards abroad.
The Popular Party led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo (center) won but does not have a majority to form a government. Photo: AFP
In this way, the Socialists go from 122 to 121 deputies and the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo from 136 to 137, both still far from the 176 seats that would give them an absolute majority in Congress.
Of the 2.3 million expatriates registered on the electoral roll, just over 233,000 (around 10%) voted on July 23, by mail or by going to the Spanish consulate in their country of residence.
However, their vote was enough to upset the balance of forces between the two ideological blocs: 171 deputies for the left and 172 for the right.
Few parties want to clothe a Núnez Feijóo whose investiture depends on the 33 deputies of the extreme right of Vox.
But now Sánchez needs at any price the support of the seven deputies of Carles Puigdemont, the separatist leader who has taken refuge in Belgium since the failure of the 2017 independence attempt, to be elected by a simple majority in a second investiture vote.
Carles Puigdemont puts pressure on Sánchez
Puigdemont's party "will have to decide whether it prefers a progressive government or join its votes to the Popular Party and Vox so that there is a right-wing government with the far right," Patxi López, Socialist spokesman in Congress, said Saturday.
From Brussels, Puigdemont conditioned his votes to Sánchez to negotiate a resolution of the "conflict like the one that exists between Catalonia and Spain", although he asked that the negotiations take place without "pressure", with "discretion" and "prudence", in a message on the social network Twitter, renamed X.
The former president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, puts conditions to Pedro Sánchez to give him his support. Photo: AFP
If neither bloc achieves a majority to form a government, the country will be forced to repeat elections, probably at the end of the year, as happened in 2016 and 2019.
In a statement that Puigdemont distributed from his Twitter account, the former Catalan leader maintains that "the final count of the votes (of the Spanish elections) entails a punctual change in the allocation of seats in the Spanish Parliament but relevant in the equation for any investiture."
"The current president of the Government and socialist candidate for re-election," he adds, "can only be elected if he obtains the affirmative vote of a very broad coalition, including the seven votes of Junts per Catalunya."
Puigdemont clarifies that, in this negotiation, "whoever believes that exerting pressure or directly practicing political blackmail will obtain some tactical benefit, the effort can be saved." "At least in my case," he says.
If Sánchez fails to win the backing of Puigdemont's party, his aspiration to renew his mandate will be definitively closed, and the country should go to new elections at the end of the year or early next year.
Source: AFP and EFE
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