The countdown clock, measuring the time that is left to avoid a repeat Catalan election, is ticking. The speaker of the Parliament of Catalonia, Josep Rull, has announced in an appearance this Wednesday afternoon - after the mandatory round of consultations with the parliamentary groups - that no candidate has been nominated for the investiture session that was to be held on June 25th and that none of them have proven to have enough support. As a result, Rull has opted for the formula of an "equivalent act to a failed investiture", which was previously used in 2019 under different circumstances, when president Quim Torra was disqualified from office through his conviction for disobedience. Going back to this precedent, and after groups such as the Republican Left (ERC) asked him to hold the session even though there is no candidate, the speaker of the Catalan chamber called a session for June 26th, at 11am, at which he will formally communicate this decision, and there will be a small debate with five minutes allocated for each parliamentary group with the aim of dealing with the issue.
With this resolution, which speaker Rull will sign on Wednesday, June 26th, the two-month deadline will be activated to avoid a new election: the parties will have until Monday, August 26th, at the latest, to be able to celebrate an investiture that successfully votes in a president to lead a new Catalan government; if not, there will be a new election on October 13th. During his address, Rull stated that he had "found that no candidate has shown willingness to undertake the investiture within these first ten working days" and that "no party has proposed any candidate for this investiture". For this reason, "there is no possibility of making any specific proposal [of a candidate]" and he is forced to opt for a resolution that starts the countdown clock.
Speaker of Parliament, Josep Rull, announces the "equivalent act" session for Wednesday, June 26th.
However, the speaker of Parliament emphasized that there are indeed two groups - the Catalan Socialists (PSC) and Together for Catalonia (Junts) - that expressed their desire to explore the "possibility of proposing a candidate for the investiture" - that is to say, Salvador Illa and Carles Puigdemont - in the course of the two months that will begin to count down on June 26th: "They have expressed the will to reach agreements so that this investiture proposal can succeed." Regarding the round of contacts, Josep Rull pointed out that it has been "extraordinarily positive from the point of view of cordiality and tone".
Why will the plenary session take place on June 26th?
The law states that, once Parliament has been constituted, there is a maximum period of ten working days for a first investiture plenum to be held. So, having taken this first step on June 10th, this session had to take place, at the latest, on June 25th. The meeting will end the day after this date, that is, next Wednesday at 11am. This session will not be an investiture session, but rather it will take into account the resolution that Rull will have signed in the morning in which he will communicate the "impossibility of proposing a candidate to be invested president of the Generalitat". The elements that explain it happening the next day - on the 26th rather than the 25th - are that, on the one hand, the parliamentary groups must be constituted by this Thursday. This means that, until then, another critical organ does not yet exist - the committee of party spokespeople, which is the body responsible for agreeing the agenda of the plenary sessions.
In addition, the speaker Josep Rull is to travel to Belgium this Thursday to meet president Carles Puigdemont, as part of his commitment to meeting with the deputies in exile. On Friday, he will travel to Switzerland to do the same with Ruben Wagensberg; and on Sunday in Northern Catalonia, where he will see former minister Lluís Puig. To all of this it should be added that Monday, June 23rd is a public holiday, and it will not be until Tuesday that the Bureau will meet again, which will have to validate the parliamentary groups constituted. On June 25th itself, there will be the first meeting of the new committee of spokespeople, which will agree, as the sole item on the agenda of the parliamentary session of the 26th, the debate on the resolution stating that there is no candidate for this first attempt at investiture.