Madrid. The Spanish Congress of Deputies, which emerged from the elections on July 23, at the beginning of its sessions yesterday, elected Francina Armengol, candidate of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), as president, with 178 votes, two above the absolute majority, after obtaining the support of the Catalan, Galician and Basque parliamentary groups.
Armengol, 52, occupies the third most important position in the country, only after the head of state, King Felipe VI, and the acting president of the government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez.
Thus, the progressive bloc achieved an important victory, especially because of the precedent it represents for the crucial investiture session, which brings closer the possibility of a new left-wing mandate led by Sánchez, and avoiding the integration of a government of the conservative Partido Popular in alliance with the far-right Vox, although for the definition of the head of the Executive the leader of the nationalist Junts per Catalunya (JxCat), Carles Puigdemont, declared that it will be necessary to negotiate.
The main key to yesterday’s vote was support in extremis of the seven deputies of JxCat, who in return obtained a written commitment that the government will promote the use of the Catalan language in the European Parliament, in addition, the other official languages, Basque and Galician, will be used regularly in sessions Congress and the justice system.
Likewise, it was agreed that two investigative commissions will be opened to find out the details of the espionage plot in the case Pegasus and the actions of the National Intelligence Center in the Islamist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, six years ago.
In his first speech as leader of the Congress, Armengol, also a republican and feminist, advocated the use of the co-official languages in the sessions: “We have to preserve and respect the diversity that coexists in our country. Spain always advances when it recognizes its plurality and diversity ”, she pointed out, after announcing that during her term she will allow the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the sessions, which until now was not allowed.
For the former Catalan president Puigdemont, from his refuge in Brussels, to give the order to the JxCat bench to vote in favor of Armengol, the copy of the letter he received from the chancellor, José Manuel Albares, in which he urged the European institutions to recognize the Catalan, Basque and Galician languages as official.
The PSOE, with 121 deputies, achieved the indispensable support of the parliamentary groups of the left-wing coalition: Sumar, with 31 seats; Republican Left of Catalonia, with seven; JxCat, with seven others; EH-Bildu, with six; the Basque Nationalist Party, with five, and the Galician Nationalist Bloc, with one.
In this vote, the block of the rights chose divided. The Popular Party (PP) only added to its cause the two deputies from the Navarro People’s Union and the Canary Islands Coalition, with which its candidate to preside over the Chamber, Cuca Gamarra, only added 139 votes of the deputies.
The extreme right of Vox finally decided not to support the PP candidate because he did not give up a seat on the legislative table, with which his 33 deputies voted for the candidacy of his bench member Ignacio Gil Lázaro. “What we don’t know is to what extent these concessions go, those cessions. And we demand light and stenographers from the Socialist Party so that the Spaniards know what they have given up to the independence movement to get their votes”, Gamarra demanded before the press.
The vote in the Senate was more predictable, since the PP has an absolute majority there, with which Pedro Roldán was elected president and the socialist Guillermo Fernández Vara, former president of Extremadura, defeated by the right in the municipal and regional elections on May 28.
Here, the left bloc voted blank, given the zero possibility of moving forward with a candidate, while the Vox senators also opted for their standard bearer.
This day is the product of the unexpected results of the parliamentary elections of July 23, in which the PP, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, obtained a victory much less than expected. The reason why the big national parties courted the Catalan, but also Basque, pro-independence deputies, is that none of them, neither the PSOE nor the PP, achieved the 176 seats that give an absolute majority.
Puigdemont, a refugee in Belgium since the failed secession attempt in 2017 and claimed by the Spanish justice, warned in a message on the X social network that the agreement was negotiated until dawn yesterday for the election of Armengol in the Congress of Deputies ” it cannot be, in any way, linked to the investiture”, so it will be necessary to work again to obtain their support again.
