Spain’s Sanchez secures another term, ending the four-month deadlock.

On Thursday, members of Spain’s parliament decided to give Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez another term in office, breaking a prolonged stalemate following an election in July that did not produce a clear winner.

His Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) had negotiated separate deals with several regional parties to secure their votes. One of these accords included a disputed measure on amnesty for Catalan separatists, which has caused protests throughout Spain.

There were no abstentions, and 179 people voted in favor of Sanchez’s candidacy, while 171 voted against it. The “nays” were from the conservative People’s Party, the far-right Vox, and the only politician from the People’s Union of Navarre.

Sanchez, who has been in power in Spain since 2018, received the votes of the PSOE’s hard-left ally Sumar, the pro-independence parties Junts and ERC in Catalonia, PNV and EH Bildu in the Basque Country, Galicia’s BNG, and the Canary Coalition.

The months-long mystery is finally over now that Sanchez has been confirmed as premier. A candidate for the conservative People’s Party (PP), Alberto Nunez Feijoo, gained the most seats in the election but could not win sufficient support from other parties in his effort to govern the country.

Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, congratulated Sanchez on the social networking platform X.

“It is good that we can continue to work side by side,” according to Scholz. “We see many challenges in the world from a very similar perspective.”

The amnesty law has infuriated a significant number of Spaniards. It recommends exonerating politicians and activists who took part in splitting Catalonia from Spain, which achieved its zenith in 2017. This endeavor reached its pinnacle in 2017. On Monday, the law was introduced and filed in parliament.

Protesters gathered outside parliament, yelled their disagreement, and rattled barricades that the police had set up as the vote was being counted.

According to the officials, there was a gathering of around 400 demonstrators outside parliament.

The weekly rallies in front of the PSOE headquarters in Madrid that started two weeks ago will resume on Thursday night, according to Javier, 25, a member of the young organization Revuelta, tied to Vox.

Leftist legislators clapped and cheered when Alberto Nunez Feijoo, whose party won the most seats in the elections in July, came across the house to shake the hand of Pedro Sanchez. At the same time, Santiago Abascal, the head of the Vox party, walked out of the parliament.

On Wednesday, Feijoo called for widespread demonstrations on November 18. He did so after accusing Sanchez of subverting the rule of law regarding the amnesty.

The European People’s Party (EPP) said on Thursday that their proposal for a discussion on whether the amnesty harms the legal system’s independence in Spain will be held the following week after the European Parliament accepted it.

Esteban Gonzalez Pons, the vice secretary of the PP, stated that the fact that the rule of law in Spain was going to be contested in the European Parliament was a “humiliation for Spain’s prestige.”