King to meet political groups again

Having received communication from the president of Congress, Francina Armengol, that the attempted investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been unsuccessful, King Felipe VI has made the decision to start a new round of consultations immediately, which will take place on Monday and Tuesday.

He will meet with the representatives of the parliamentary groups to designate a new candidate, as reported by the Royal Family in a brief statement. Everything indicates that Pedro Sánchez will be chosen.

This will be the tenth round of consultations that King Felipe VI will carry out since he became Head of State in 2014, an evident sign of the political instability that has occurred in Spain during the last decade due to fragmentation with the emergence of new parties. In fact, since 2015, Spain has twice been forced into a repeat election (2016 and 2019) due to the lack of agreement between the parties.

Of those ten rounds of consultations that he has carried out, in three he has proposed Pedro Sánchez as a candidate, who has lost on two occasions (2016 and 2019) and has won on one (2019). He has proposed Mariano Rajoy on two occasions and the former leader of the PP was defeated on one occasion and victorious on another. And now the Monarch has proposed Feijóo and is expected to propose Sánchez for the fourth time.

That is to say, Spanish democracy has begun to witness unusual episodes in the last decade: electoral repetitions, a successful motion of censure or the possibility of forming a government chaired by a party that did not win the majority public vote in the elections (PSOE).

In the first round of consultations held on August 21 and 22, the King decided to appoint Feijóo and set the criterion: he assured that, except in the XI Legislature, in all the others he has always chosen to propose the candidate of the political group which has obtained more seats. “This practice has become a custom over the years,” the statement noted, arguing that there is also “no existence of a sufficient majority for the investiture that, if applicable, would cause this custom to decline.”

Congress has until November 27 to invest a candidate and avoid a repeat election. At the moment, the PSOE is avoiding giving dates on a possible attempt to investiture Sánchez, although initially there was speculation about mid-October. The truth is that the problems with the pro-independence parties have multiplied in recent hours after the order by ERC and Junts to make Sánchez’s investiture subject to a commitment from the PSOE to the right of self-determination.

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