Sanchez makes bid to start Spain’s new government

Bloomberg

Pedro Sanchez began his bid on Saturday to form a new government with assistance from a Catalan separatist party as he urged Spain’s parliament to help him end the country’s political deadlock.
Sanchez, Spain’s acting prime minister, needs to win the endorsement of the 350-seat chamber in a voting process that will continue until Tuesday. He is likely to lose a first vote slated for Sunday, but after 13 deputies from the pro-independence Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya agreed to abstain, victory in a second vote on Tuesday looks assured.
“Good morning. Spain is not going to break up, the Constitution is not going to break up,” Sanchez, 47, said in his speech opening the parliamentary debate. “What will break up is the blockade of the progressive government that Spaniards democratically elected.”
Spanish politics has been at a stalemate since Sanchez dissolved parliament to spark the first of two inconclusive general elections in April. With the parliament divided among five major parties and a medley of smaller regional groups after a second vote in November, Sanchez turned to Esquerra to make the arithmetic work in his favor after signing a coalition pact with Podemos.
The investiture debate marks the latest attempt to mend a political system that fractured in 2015 when former People’s Party Premier Mariano Rajoy lost the parliamentary majority he had won four years earlier at the height of Spain’s financial crisis. Sanchez ousted Rajoy in a 2018 confidence vote but has struggled to impose his authority at the head of a minority government.
November’s elections left him in a similar bind as
his Socialists once again emerged as the biggest party but short of the parliamentary support needed to govern. To break the deadlock, the Socialists sealed a deal with Esquerra that, last-minute hiccups notwithstanding, should give him enough votes to be able to form a government.