 After months of talks with the different party leaders, and with there being no apparent candidate in a position of support in forming a government, a royal decree was issued dissolving parliament with new elections being called in June.This marked the first time since the transition to democracy that an election was called under Article 99.5 of the Constitution, wherein the initiative for issuing the dissolution of the Cortes belonged to the King and not to the Prime Minister.On 3 October 2017, as huge protest rallies and a general strike took place in Catalonia following the illegal 2017 Catalan independence referendum, Felipe delivered an unusually strongly worded televised address in which he condemned the actions of the referendum organizers for acting "outside the law", accusing them of "unacceptable disloyalty" and of "eroding the harmony and co-existence within Catalan society itself".