PSOE chief to call on parties to avert new election in investiture speech

The leader of the Socialist Party (PSOE), Pedro Sánchez, will today face the beginning of a nearly week-long investiture debate in Congress, at which he is far from assured of victory. The politician will defend his candidacy in Spain’s lower house with the support of the 90 deputies from his party, and 40 from center-right group Ciudadanos – far short of the absolute majority he needs to be voted in as prime minister. Once he has the floor, he will call on Spain’s political forces to “allow for a government of change,” and so avoid a repeat of the December 20 general election, at which the incumbent Popular Party secured most votes, but fell short of a majority, leaving no winner.

An appeal to the sense of “responsibility” of Spain’s political forces will be the common theme of Sánchez’s speeches

In a bid to win the support he needs, Sánchez on Monday sent proposals to, among others, anti-austerity party Podemos, with a view to negotiating either their votes in favor, or their abstentions. But the party and its territorial partners, along with smaller groups Compromís and United Left (IU), all rejected the overtures. Sánchez will use this week’s debate to try to convince them otherwise ahead of the last vote on Friday, and at which he only needs more votes in favor than against, rather than an absolute majority, to become prime minister.

At 4.30pm today, the candidate chosen by King Felipe VI to try to form a government will lay out policies based on the common ground he has found with Ciudadanos and that last week led the two parties to sign a deal that would be the basis for a minority government. The content of these policies ought to be acceptable for a wide political spectrum, according to Sánchez’s vision.

An appeal to the sense of “responsibility” of Spain’s political forces will be the common theme of his speeches in Congress, during which he will argue that there is a foundation for a deal. He will also call for a “government of change” to “avoid new elections,” according to sources from the party. The policies he lays out will be punctuated continuously with adjectives such as “progressive and reformist.”

But for now the political climate is not at all receptive to this request, as was clear on Monday, when Podemos rejected outright the proposal it had received from the PSOE. “The PSOE has sent us a number of documents that are merely copied and pasted from their agreement with Ciudadanos, hiding the most shameful measures,” party leader Pablo Iglesias wrote on his Twitter account. “This is not serious.”

“The PSOE has sent us a number of documents that are merely copied and pasted from their agreement with Ciudadanos, hiding the most shameful measures”

Sánchez replied to Iglesias’s tweet saying: “It is down to you whether these measures begin a government of change. It would not be serious for [Mariano] Rajoy to continue.”

This week’s investiture debate marks the conclusion of the negotiations that have been in motion since the December 20 general election, which marked the end of the dominance of the PP-PSOE two-party system that had been in place almost since Spain returned to democracy in the late 1970s. Incumbent Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, of the Popular Party, refused a request from the king to try to form a government on the basis that he lacked sufficient support from opposition parties. Instead it has fallen to Pedro Sánchez to try to find the votes needed, despite his party having garnered one of the worst results in its history at the 2015 polls. Both the PP and PSOE lost ground to Podemos and Ciudadanos, which have become the third and fourth biggest political forces in Spain, respectively.

English version by Simon Hunter.