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Neighbours elections

It is difficult keeping up with Spanish politics at the moment especially after the recent election, first attempt.  It is important to Gibraltar not always what party but who governs the party for they and their supporters govern policy especially when it comes to Gibraltar. However after the vote on the 27th Sept this is where they are now. We still wait.

Pedro Sanchez will have to convince six parties to support him, including the Catalan separatist Junts party. Unsurprisingly, even though he came out on top in the Spanish parliamentary elections on July 23, People’s Party (PP) candidate Alberto Nuñez Feijoo failed to secure enough votes to head the next government. With 172 votes in favor – his party, the far-right Vox and a Canary Islands party – and 178 against – the left and regionalist parties – he lost the investiture vote at the Congress of Deputies on Wednesday, September 27. A second vote will take place on Friday, which should produce a similar result and pave the way for the candidacy of Pedro Sanchez.

Having come in second place in the July elections, the current head of government faces the complex task of winning over six different parties if he is to remain in power. While he is assured the votes of the radical left-wing Sumar movement, with which he intends to form a new left-wing coalition, they are not enough. He also needs to win the support of Basque, Galician and, above all, Catalan nationalists and pro-independence parties. These include those of the separatist Junts party, led by the former president of the Catalan government Carles Puigdemont, for whom the proposal of a “buffer zone” with the far right is not enough.

Speaking from Belgium, where he fled after the October 2017 secession vote attempt with the Spanish judiciary after him, Puigdemont has already set the conditions for possible support. First and foremost, he is demanding an amnesty law concerning all offenses linked to the calling of the illegal referendum on October 1, 2017, and the writing-off of the Catalonia region’s debt, without ruling out self-determination.