The president of the Congress of Deputies, Francina Armengol, has officially convened the Plenary Session to debate and vote on the investiture of Pedro Sánchez for next Wednesday and Thursday, as reported by elDiario.es. The investiture debate will begin on Wednesday and the vote, in which Sánchez requires an absolute majority, will be a day later, on Thursday.
“After speaking these days with the candidate that His Majesty the King nominated to be a candidate for the Presidency, Mr. Pedro Sánchez Castejón, and having told me that he has made the rounds with all the groups, he is now in a position to be able to go to the debate of investiture,” Armengol announced this Monday at a press conference in Congress.
The electoral law establishes that in the event that this attempt fails, a second vote will be held within 48 hours, therefore, on Saturday the 18th, when the PSOE leader would only need a simple majority, more ‘yes’ than ‘no’. The PSOE has already closed agreements with Sumar, ERC, Junts, PNV, EH Bildu, BNG and CC. A total of 179 votes that allow it to exceed the absolute majority. If everything goes as planned, Sánchez will be president on Thursday, in the first vote.
The investiture comes 16 weeks after the elections and just two weeks before the deadline expires – on the 27th – after which new general elections would have been automatically called for January.
The Plenary Session will take place after the failed investiture process of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who failed in his attempt to be elected president on September 29, by not achieving more ‘yeses’ than ‘noes’ in the Congressional vote in which only He obtained the support of Vox, the Canarian Coalition and the UPN, in addition to that of his own deputies.
As Armengol recalled, the Plenary Session, which will start at 12 noon, will begin with the intervention of the candidate and then those of the spokespersons of the different groups will take place, in order from largest to smallest. Tomorrow Congress will hold a Board of Spokespersons to organize and coordinate the debate.
The session will be held in a heated atmosphere in the streets, after days of demonstrations in front of the PSOE headquarters, on Ferraz Street in Madrid, many of them resulting in incidents and arrests. Congress will reinforce security measures amid fears that these demonstrations will move to the vicinity of the Lower House during the investiture session.
Asked about this matter, Armengol has defended the space for citizens to demonstrate freely but has criticized the statements of some right-wing political leaders, without specifically mentioning any, that “rather than uniting, they separate” and that “rather than urging concord, they urge tension now, division.”
“I think it is important to appreciate democracy, values, institutions and dialogue as never before as a way of understanding each other. What I also want to value is to categorically condemn any type of aggression, violence, contempt for public order as we have experienced these days in some streets of Spain,” the president of Congress also said.
Source: www.eldiario.es
