Within a day of each other, the French National Assembly and the Congress of Deputies have debatedor motions of no confidence against their respective governments. On Monday, in the case of France, destructive censorship was debated – vetoing a pension reform processed without a parliamentary vote and causing the fall of the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne – and was rejected by only nine votes. This Tuesday, in Spain, a theoretically constructive motion of censure was being debated according to constitutional provisions: it must include a candidate for the presidency of the Government who, if approved, would be sworn in as president.
The reality, however, is that the debate on the initiative sponsored by Vox has become more like a destructive vote of no confidence. Not only for arithmetic reasons -the motion had only the endorsement of Vox and the abstention of the PP-, but also political: the long face to face between Santiago Abascalwho filed the motion, and Pedro Sanchezwhich glossed the achievements of his government, with successive replies and counter-replies, marked the parliamentary tempo and left as a second course the intervention of Ramón Tamames, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The veteran candidate has been only the Vox Joker.
Tamames took advantage of his moment of glory to list some of the issues in his speech, which had previously been leaked, but did not propose an alternative program; he even forgot to verbalize the proposal that, if elected, he would call early elections to coincide with the municipal ones in May. His musings out loud were impregnated with a poor digestion of the constitutional text and explain his political drift: from being a member of the PCE to embracing the discourse of the extreme political and media right on the “decomposition” of Spain, with an electoral reform included to stop the representation of the peripheries; also a deficit of plurality, beginning with linguistics. All this, with digressions on the Civil War, of a revisionist nature, which put the errors of the Republic and the coup d’état against the constitutional order that overthrew it on the same level.
Vox’s motion, with Tamames de mirlo blanco, has only been a maneuver by the extreme right to trying to show the right that they are the real opposition and recover the leadership lost against the PP. From this perspective, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, By opting for abstention, he distances himself from the forcefulness wielded by his predecessor, Pablo Casado, who put together one of his best speeches against Vox’s previous motion of no confidence. The abstention of the PP is not alien to its post-electoral calculations both for the municipal and regional elections in May and, above all, for the general elections at the end of the year.
President Sánchez, meanwhile, will be successful of a motion of no confidence that has not built an alternative but has not resolved its underlying problems, beginning with the cohesion of the government coalition itself. The president gave one of his vice presidents, Yolanda Díaz, a turn to reply. It is, as Tamames ironically pointed out, an implicit endorsement of his electoral platform, but Podemos can torpedo it. The first test will be the municipal ones, but the motion of censure or confidence, natural size, will be aired in the December general ones.