Liar poker or real risk of failure? The Spanish Socialist Pedro Sanchez still does not have enough support to be reappointed to power next week by the Parliament, Podemos refusing so far to support him.

Nearly three months after the Spanish legislative elections on April 28, the specter of continued political instability still hangs over the eurozone's fourth economy, which has already gone to the polls three times in three and a half years.

Winner of the elections, the outgoing head of government has only 123 seats out of 350 in the Chamber of Deputies. He therefore absolutely needs the support of the 42 deputies of the Radical Left Party Podemos, and of several regionalist parties, to be re-elected to power next week during the inaugural session.

>> To see: "Legislative in Spain: the impossible majority?"

A first vote of the deputies will take place Tuesday but it requires an absolute majority that Pedro Sanchez seems a priori not able to gather. A second vote should therefore be held on Thursday when a relative majority will suffice. But for the moment he has no guarantee of winning because he still has not won the support of Podemos.

In case of a new failure on Thursday, Pedro Sanchez will be able to return to be invested by September 23, date-fixed before the automatic calling of new elections for November.

For Sanchez, "a government including Iglesias would be paralyzed"

Podemos requires from the beginning his entry into the government. After opposing a refusal, Pedro Sanchez dropped the ballast by accepting the appointment of Podemos ministers with a more technical than political profile.

But on the other hand, he insisted on Thursday that he did not want Pablo Iglesias, head of this formation, in his executive.

"A government including Iglesias would be paralyzed" by its "internal contradictions," said the outgoing head of government, citing in particular their differences over Catalonia, whose secession attempt in 2017 provoked one of the country's worst political crises. country.

>> To read: "In Spain, the socialist Pedro Sanchez great winner of the Europeans"

In this game of liar poker, Pablo Iglesias showed some optimism on Friday. "We have to be patient with the Socialist Party (...), I am convinced that they will eventually conclude that the most sensible way - and the only one possible - is to negotiate a coalition agreement with us", a- he declared in the press.

The history of relations between the two formations is chaotic. Last year, Podemos allowed Pedro Sanchez to come to power by supporting his motion of censure against conservative Mariano Rajoy.

Sanchez asks the right to facilitate his nomination by abstaining during the vote

But in 2016, the Socialist tried unsuccessfully to negotiate an agreement with this party to become head of government. Podemos then voted against the investiture of the Socialist, supported by the liberals of Ciudadanos. The blockage led to new elections.

Political scientist at the University of Zaragoza, Cristina Monge does not want to believe this time in a new election. "You can not exclude anything, but I do not think anyone has any interest in it, and one way or another they will come to an agreement," she says.

According to Oriol Bartomeus, political scientist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​the threat of new elections "is more a scarecrow, a game of dupes than a real will".

But "we could end up getting new elections unintentionally, which would represent a serious problem for the confidence (of the citizens) towards the political class," he warned however.

Faced with this risk, Pedro Sanchez calls on the right to facilitate his nomination by abstaining during the vote - which it refuses - because he absolutely wants to avoid that his election does not depend on the voices of Catalan independence.

With AFP