As everything made foresee, María Guardiola has not achieved a sufficient majority in the Extremadura Assembly, with the only positive vote from the PP (29) and, with the vote against from the rest of the political forces, among them Vox (36).
So, the Popular Party candidate continues as acting president, and from now on, with the clock activated with the countdown, she will have until May 3, to achieve in another vote the support of the Extremaduran chamber.
Political sources point to a possible agreement between PP and Vox, but not before the elections in Castilla y León, which will take place next March 15.
Before the vote, the PP candidate for the Junta de Extremadura, María Guardiola, has urged the opposition parliamentary groups to facilitate her continuity at the head of the regional Executive through their abstention in the second investiture vote. With this, she intends to unblock the current institutional situation in the community and warns that citizens would not understand if the session concluded without a minimum understanding.
In her speech prior to the second vote, Guardiola has remarked that on this occasion the 29 seats of the Popular Group are enough for her to be invested by simple majority. Even so, she has addressed the rest of the parties, without citing them by their acronyms, to emphasize that she is not asking them to abandon their principles nor to assume the proposals of her government program.
"I don't need any group to subscribe to everything that has been expressed here. It is enough not to cast a vote against. It is enough that the desire to continue working is not blocked," Guardiola has stated, who has insisted that she is not asking "anyone" to renounce their programs nor to "applaud what they do not fully share".
As he has emphasized, what he demands is "something much simpler, and that they let govern whoever won the elections with electoral support of 43 percent".
Guardiola made these statements this Friday, March 6, in the second vote of her investiture as president of the Junta de Extremadura. In the first session, held the previous Wednesday, she did not achieve the necessary absolute majority and only had the support of the 29 PP deputies, while PSOE, Vox, and Unidas por Extremadura voted against.
It is worth remembering that, in this new vote, a simple majority is enough for her to be re-elected at the head of the regional Government, although PP sources had already advanced Vox's "no" also in this second parliamentary appointment.
"My obligation is not to surrender, but to keep insisting on that dialogue and that will," the 'popular' leader has stressed, who continues to try for an agreement that has not materialized in the two days since the first vote, while the people of Extremadura "continue to wait for an answer."
"All Extremaduran families are watching us and what they don't deserve is for us to keep talking about ourselves, about our parties, about the internal problems each one may have and about the better and worse results some and others may have obtained," Guardiola pointed out, before emphasizing that her function is "to give a response to Extremaduran society."
In his opinion, no citizen of the region would understand that this session would end "without an agreement and at odds". "None", he emphasized, after explaining that he has traveled all over Extremadura and that "everywhere people ask for the same thing, that we agree, that we stop fighting and that we start working".
Guardiola has stated that now it's time to check "if this chamber is going to allow" her to continue at the head of the Extremaduran Executive, after having presented "with data" the advances achieved by the community during her mandate and of presenting the model of change that, she maintains, the citizenry demanded in 2023.
He has defended that this project can only be consolidated with a government that has "full capacity for action and with the loyalty and, of course, the trust" of the regional Parliament, before which he has already detailed his program. Regarding this, he has insisted that it is not a "catalog of good intentions", but rather the "expanded and much more ambitious continuation of a model that is bearing fruit and that needs stability to consolidate itself".
According to what he has stated, said model is based on the reduction of the tax burden, the simplification of administrative procedures, the protection of public services, and the demand for "fair treatment" by the Government of Spain towards Extremadura.