Tamames and Vox: Batet confirms that Vox’s motion of no confidence will begin on March 21 and will be voted on on March 22 | Spain | The USA Print

The president of Congress, the socialist Meritxell Batet, has confirmed this Monday that the debate on the new Vox motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, will begin on the morning of Tuesday, March 21 and will end with the vote on Wednesday 22, as EL PAÍS had advanced. Batet has previously formally communicated that decision to the head of the Executive; the candidate, the veteran economist Ramón Tamames; and to ultra training. 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. This Tuesday, the Presidency of the Cortes will close the schedule of the session and other logistical and organizational aspects in the Table and the Board of Spokespersons of the Congress. The motion is doomed to failure because it does not have support, but the Government gives this appointment, which the PP intends to decaffeinate, the greatest political relevance.

Vox registered its second motion of censure against Sánchez on February 27, almost three months after announcing it and waiting unsuccessfully for it to be led by the opposition leader, the popular Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and later, for it to be Add some other party. After searching and testing various independent applicants, Professor Ramón Tamames, 89, agreed to be a candidate, and the debate will take place over two days: between March 21 and 22. The normal thing would be for the session to begin on the morning of the 21st with the presentation of the candidate’s alternative government program, since motions of censure have a constructive nature according to the Constitution, and in the afternoon of that day the debates with the parties would take place. with the highest representation in the Chamber. On Wednesday the 22nd the session with the minority forces would culminate, and finally with the vote.

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.

The motion will take place 23 days after the filing of your petition, 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.