Congress knocks down the Tamames motion, which only adds the affirmative vote of Vox and that of a former Cs deputy

MADRID, 22 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Plenary Session of Congress has rejected this Wednesday the motion of censure presented by Vox with the independent economist Ramón Tamames as a candidate for Prime Minister. After a day and a half of debates, the initiative has not gained any support and has only achieved the abstention of the PP, which in the first motion of Santiago Abascal voted against.

To prosper, the motion of no confidence by Tamames and Vox needed the support of an absolute majority in Congress (176 votes), but it has fallen far behind, at 53 votes.

In the vote, which has been public and by appeal, with the deputies standing up and announcing their vote out loud, the motion of censure has garnered 52 votes in favour, those of the party that promoted it, plus the former deputy of Ciudadanos Pablo Cambronero, who moved to the Mixed Group after the internal crisis in spring 2021.

But they have lost to the 201 deputies against, from the PSOE, Unidas Podemos, ERC, Ciudadanos, PNV, Bildu, Junts, PDeCAT, Más País, Compromís, CC, CUP, BNG, PRC and Teruel Existe, as well as the former deputy of Podemos Meri Pita, who went to the Mixed Group.

They are the same positions that these parties held in the motion of no confidence led by Santiago Abascal in 2020, but this time there have been more abstentions, a total of 91, coming from the PP and its allies from Foro and Navarra Suma.

This Wednesday the deputies of United We Can Marisa Saavedra and Roberto Uriarte, and the parliamentarian of Bildu Isabel Pozueta, who were absent and have not accepted the telematic vote, have not voted.

With this result, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, will be able to go to his international appointments this week boasting of having defeated another motion of no confidence against him. Specifically, he plans to attend Brussels (Belgium) to participate in a meeting of the Council of the European Union and travel to Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) for the Ibero-American Summit.

This week has been the sixth motion of no confidence since the 1978 Constitution, the second that Vox presents this legislature and the first in history that is headed by an independent candidate, with no organic link to the party that proposes him. Of course, Ramón Tamames, 89, is a candidate with a long political career as he was leader of the PCE in the Transition, deputy mayor of Madrid with the socialist Enrique Tierno Galván, founder of Izquierda Unida and later a militant of Adolfo Suárez's CDS.

Of the five motions of censure debated to date, all failed except the one headed in 2018 by the now Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

The first motion of no confidence in democracy took place in 1980, when the PSOE presented one against Adolfo Suárez headed by its leader at the time, Felipe González, who obtained the support of 152 deputies (socialists, communists, Andalusians and three representatives of the Mixed Group ), compared to the rejection of 166 and the abstention of another 21 -11 absences were registered in the session--. That is to say, the PSOE was left 24 votes away from getting the approval of the motion of censure.

The second came seven years later, in 1987, when Alianza Popular did the same against Felipe González. Then the candidate was Antonio Hernández Mancha, who was not a deputy as is now the case with Tamames, and garnered the favorable vote of 66 deputies (Popular Alliance and Valencian Union), while 195 voted against (PSOE, United Left and Basque nationalists) and 71 abstained (representatives of CDS and CiU, among others).

The third motion of censure was 20 years later and was presented by Pablo Iglesias (Podemos) against Mariano Rajoy, held in June 2017, it was also rejected by 170 votes against (PP, Ciudadanos, UPN, Foro Asturias and Coalición Canaria), 82 in favor (Unidos Podemos, ERC, Compromís and EH Bildu) and 97 abstentions (PSOE, PDeCAT, PNV and Nueva Canarias).

The fourth was the only one that has prospered, the one that allowed Sánchez to access La Moncloa in June 2018 by gathering 180 votes in favor (PSOE, Unidas Podemos, ERC, PDeCAT, PNV, Compromís, Bildu and Nueva Canarias) 169 against (PP, Ciudadanos, UPN and Foro Asturias) and one abstention, that of Coalición Canaria.

And the last motion of no confidence and the first of the legislature was promoted by Vox in the fall of 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, and with Abascal as a candidate. Like this week, it did not add any support, beyond its 52 deputies.