First round won for Pedro Sánchez. The outgoing Spanish Prime Minister won his bet on Thursday at the opening of the parliamentary session, by having the Socialist candidate, Francina Armengol, elected to the presidency of the Assembly, thanks to a last-minute agreement with the party representing Spain. hard wing of Catalan separatism.
Francina Armengol, 52, won 178 votes in the first round, two more than the required majority, thanks to the votes of the seven deputies of Junts per Catalunya (JxCat, Together for Catalonia), the party led by the independence leader Carles Puigdemont, exiled in Belgium and wanted by Spanish justice since the failure in 2017 of an attempt to secede from Catalonia.
Failure of the right
This agreement between the socialist party and that of Carles Puigdemont is important because it gives a first positive indication on the chances of the Prime Minister to be invested Prime Minister again in the coming days and thus to avoid new elections.
The rival of Pedro Sánchez, rival Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the People’s Party (right), who also claims the post of Prime Minister, experienced a resounding failure during this opening session of Parliament. Its candidate for the presidency of the assembly, Cuca Gamarra, who hoped to obtain 172 votes and therefore thought that he could win in the event of the abstention of the deputies of Junts, finally won only 139 votes, namely those of the 137 deputies of the PP and those of the elected representatives of two small regional parties. The 33 deputies of Vox, a far-right party on which the PP depended, have in fact decided to vote for their own candidate.