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| - Spain's parliament on Wednesday began debating a no-confidence motion filed by the far-right Vox against the leftwing coalition government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. The motion, the fifth since Spain returned to democracy in 1976, has no chance of passing given that Vox has only 52 seats in the 350-seat chamber and the move has no political support. During nearly two hours of debate, Vox leader Santiago Abascal railed against Sanchez's administration as "the worst government in 80 years", in a reference which included the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). In response, Sanchez denounced the motion, which will be put to a vote on Thursday, as "a blatant display of propaganda aimed at sowing discord and hatred between Spaniards". The proposal has piled pressure on the rightwing opposition Popular Party (PP), which must choose whether to vote against the motion, in order to maintain its distance from the far right, or to abstain to keep the peace with Vox's electorate. Founded in 2014 by Abascal, Vox has steadily bled support from the PP, leaving the party in a tricky position of having to choose between a more central position or veering to the right to staunch the flow of voters. Sanchez has asked PP leader Pablo Casado to vote against the motion "to show that the right (in Spain) has nothing to do with the far-right". Abascal also savaged Sanchez over his government's management of the pandemic, which has claimed more than 34,000 lives and infected nearly one million people -- the highest number in the European Union. "Show me one country that has managed this crisis worse (than your government)," he demanded of Sanchez who barely looked at him. "One day, history will judge those who with special cruelty abandoned the dying without letting them say their goodbyes in their final moments," he said. The last time MPs debated a no-confidence motion was in June 2018, in a move put forward by the Socialist party on the back of a huge corruption scandal that brought down the government of PP prime minister Mariano Rajoy. That no-confidence motion won the backing of the hard-left Podemos party, along with Basque and Catalan separatist factions, allowing Sanchez to take over as head of government. Since January, Sanchez has been at the head of a leftwing coalition comprising his Socialists and Podemos, which commands a minority of 155 mandates in parliament. mig/hmw/ds/pvh
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