BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Spain’s parliament on Tuesday debated a confidence vote brought by the nation’s far-right Vox party against the governing left-wing coalition that has little chance of succeeding.
No other party in the 348-member lower chamber in Madrid has said it will support the attempt by Vox’s 52 lawmakers to topple the government of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez when the vote is held on Wednesday.
In a move that has been widely panned by other political parties and Spanish media, Vox leader Santiago Abascal has broken with custom and is not presenting himself as an alternative prime minister. Instead, in an attempt to lure votes from centrist and leftist legislators, Vox convinced a former communist party member and university professor to lead the no-confidence measure.
Ramon Tamames, 89, who was a lawmaker in the 1970s-80s, has pledged that if the vote were to prosper, his only act as prime minister would be to immediately call for national elections to coincide with a local election already scheduled for May 28.
While Tamames has said that he does not agree with many of Vox’s positions, which include its negation of climate change, unfounded charges that migrants are linked to more violent crimes, and its attacks on feminism, he does share the party’s concerns regarding Catalan and Basque separatism. Vox announced its intention to bring the confidence motion after Sanchez’s government reformed laws on sedition and embezzlement to relieve the legal pressure on Catalan separatists last December.
The traditional conservatives of the Popular Party, who lead the parliamentary opposition to the government, have said that they will abstain. Popular Party leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo, has criticized the vote as only handing a parliamentary victory to Sanchez, and as unnecessary with a general election due in December.
Political observers say that Vox is trying to gain traction ahead of a busy election year where it aims to become key to right-wing governments in town halls in May before the big prize at the end of the year when it hopes to enter a right-wing coalition with the Popular Party in the national government.
“The majority of no-confidence votes in Spanish politics are destined to lose from the start, but they are also known as a chance for the party that presents them to be in the spotlight,” Montserrat Nebrera, analyst and former lawmaker of the Popular Party in Catalonia, told The Associated Press.
This is the second time that Vox has brought a confidence vote against the current government. Its first attempt to topple Sanchez in October 2020 for his handling of the pandemic and replace him with Abascal flopped.