Spain's Feijoo fails final parliamentary vote to be PM
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00:00 to Spain where a right-wing opposition leader has lost a second attempt to become the country's
00:05 new prime minister. Alberto Núñez-Fejo failed to pass a key vote in Parliament on Thursday
00:10 and then again this afternoon. The vote sets in motion a two-month countdown to new elections
00:16 unless outgoing socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez can garner sufficient support to
00:20 keep his job as PM. Let's cross to our correspondent in Madrid, Sarah Morris. Sarah, what can you
00:26 tell us about this vote this afternoon? Well, the Conservative leader Alberto Núñez-Fejo
00:35 has lost the vote. That was always expected but it was one small surprise that there was
00:42 172 voted for Mr Fejo versus 177. After one Catalan separatist made a mistake in his vote,
00:52 he voted yes to Mr Fejo and then had his vote disqualified when he wanted to change it to
01:00 no. Otherwise, this was not a surprise. It was always going to be a mission impossible.
01:05 Mr Fejo managed to get the support of the far-right party Vox. He also managed to get
01:12 two smaller parties to back him. But the separatist regional parties that held the balance of
01:19 power and still continue to hold it, they see that they've got more to gain from backing
01:26 the continuation of the socialist PM Pedro Sánchez with his far-left allies, SUMA.
01:35 Well, so Sarah, is there still a path for Pedro Sánchez to hold on to the premiership?
01:40 I mean, what happens next?
01:43 Well, Pedro Sánchez has continued to tell everybody that there will be another government,
01:52 that he will be able to keep the socialists and the left-wing party SUMA in power, that he will
01:57 do a deal with the Catalan separatists. However, what we saw this week was that he didn't even want
02:05 to step up to argue against Fejo. He let that job fall to an ordinary socialist MP. He seems to,
02:14 for the moment, he doesn't want to talk about the price that he'll have to pay to deliver the
02:22 support of the Catalan separatist party. And Fejo attacked him for that, basically saying this week
02:30 that Carlos Puigdemont, the former Catalan president who declared independence of the
02:36 northeastern region and then fled to Belgium, that he holds the power in his hands and that
02:42 essentially Mr Sánchez will deliver him an amnesty for everybody who spent public money on that
02:50 independence bid, but that Sánchez will not be spelling out the terms of that amnesty,
02:56 which is still being negotiated. We know that last night the socialist party put out a statement
03:04 in which it seemed to say that they will draw the line at delivering a referendum on whether
03:10 Catalonia should break away from the rest of Spain. And that is what Puigdemont in Belgium
03:16 is also calling for, calling for amnesty and a referendum. We don't know if that will be a price
03:22 that Pedro Sánchez wants to pay. If he doesn't and if he can't form a government,
03:27 then the clock is now ticking. Two months if nobody can form a government,
03:32 there will be a repeat election probably for mid-January.