Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called a snap election on April 28 on Friday after the Catalan parties brought down the minority socialist government by voting down the budget earlier this week.
Here is everything you need to know about the snap vote.
“One cannot govern without a budget,” Sanchez said at a televised address on Friday.
“Between doing nothing and continuing without the budget and calling on Spaniards to have their say, I choose the second. Spain needs to keep advancing, progressing with tolerance,” he said.
The fallout with Catalonia after an independence bid in 2017 is still proving a burden to Spanish politics. This week and a day before the budget vote, 12 Catalan leaders went on trial in Spain’s Supreme Court for their role in the secessionist drive.
Sanchez has also faced pressure from the centre-right parties (Popular Party and Ciudadnaos) and far-right Vox party, who called on supporters to protest in Madrid last Sunday over the government’s handling of the Catalan crisis.
“The call for early elections after less than a year of the Sanchez government demonstrates once again what we already knew: the Catalan question is the main source of instability for Spanish politics,” Spanish sociologist and political scientist Jorge Galindo told Euronews.
The vote will be the country’s fourth general election in eight years.
Sanchez, 46, has been prime minister for only eight months and has governed with no electoral mandate and with only 84 deputies in the 350 seats in Congress. He decided not to call an early election after ousting conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in June.
Sanchez’s Socialist party is leading in opinion polls but they also show that no single party would win the necessary 176 votes to govern alone, according to the latest survey by the Center for Sociological Research of Spain (CIS).
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