The countdown begins to try to invest a new president before March 26 (or to repeat elections on July 21)

BarcelonaSalvador Illa says he will run for the investiture as the winner (in votes) of the elections, but Pere Aragonès is the one who has more options to get the necessary majority in the chamber. The two will have to try to convince the next Speaker of the Parliament, who will be elected on 12 March at the latest. After the elections a period of 20 working days has been opened to call the constitutive session of the thirteenth legislature. It will be Aragonès who will call it, as the highest representative of the current acting government. If the deadline runs out, then, on the 12th, Ernest Maragall, 78 years old, as the oldest MP after keeping his Barcelona seat would lead the process of electing the new president of the chamber. This is, in fact, the first negotiation that the parties will have to address. Until now, the agreement between JxCat and ERC established that an MP of the party that did not preside over the Generalitat would be Parliament speaker, but everything is yet to be discussed. If these two parties reach an agreement, especially in the absence of an alternative bloc, they would most likely secure the Speaker and first vice Speaker positions.

Once the Parliamentary Bureau, which consists of a president, two vice-presidents and four members, has been elected, another period of ten working days will be opened to hold the first session of the investiture debate. That is, if the chamber is constituted on March 12th, the deadline would be Friday 26th of the same month. However, in one of the last reports of the Parliament's lawyers, an extra margin was left in the hands of the president of the chamber to be able, for example, to allow for a hypothetical repetition of the elections to be held on a sunday. If this possibility is considered, instead of the 26th, the investiture debate would have to be called for Monday 29th March.

In the event that the candidate is invested president in the first vote (27 or 30 March) or in the second, forty-eight hours later, he or she would be named president of the Generalitat by King Felipe VI and would take office in a maximum of five days. Therefore, in April there would be a new president. But in Catalonia we are used to things not being so easy. If the candidate loses the first vote in the investiture debate, the two-month countdown to the automatic dissolution of the chamber would begin if there were no agreement on the investiture of a candidate. Some parties have already pointed to this possible deadlock during the election campaign. On 27 or 30 May the deadline would end and Parliament would be automatically dissolved and new elections would have to be held on the 21st or, to make it a Sunday, on 24 July.