Following the rally, the president of Catalonia, Artur Mas, in a previously scheduled meeting with the prime minister of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, requested and was denied (on the basis of its purported unconstitutionality) a change in the taxation system in Catalonia that would have made it similar to that of the two communities of chartered regime. The week after the meeting, Mas called for the dissolution of the Catalan Parliament and for early elections to be held on 25 November 2012. Before its dissolution, the Catalan parliament approved a bill calling for the next legislature to allow Catalonia to exercise its right of self-determination by holding a "referendum or consultation" during the next four years in which the people would decide whether to become a new independent and sovereign State. This parliamentary decision was approved by a large majority of deputies: 84 voted affirmative, 21 voted negative and 25 abstained. The deputy prime minister of Spain, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, declared that the central government would exercise all "legal instruments" (current legislation requires the executive government or the Congress of Deputies to call for or sanction a binding referendum) to block any such attempt. The leaders of the opposition, in the Catalan Parliament, in the Cortes Generales, and from the Socialist Party, do not support Catalan secession, but instead favor changing the constitution to modify the current taxation system and to create a true federal system in Spain, to "better reflect the singularities" of Catalonia.