There is no time to waste, they say. Once the turn of the leader of the Popular Party has failed, the time has come for the leader of the PSOE. And Pedro Sánchez plans to appear today at the Moncloa, to confirm his willingness to run for a new investiture as President of the Government, once Felipe VI orders him to do so after completing with Alberto Núñez Feijóo the round of consultations with the groups that started yesterday.
Without the attendance of four of the parties whose support will be essential for Sánchez’s re-election –ERC, Junts, EH Bildu and BNG–, the King received yesterday in La Zarzuela the representatives of the Unión del Pueblo Navarro (UPN) and the Canarian Coalition (CC), as well as Aitor Esteban (PNV), Yolanda Díaz (Sumar) and Santiago Abascal (Vox). Felipe VI’s round of consultations will culminate this morning with Sánchez and Feijóo. And so the PSOE leader’s turn will begin to be able to secure a parliamentary majority that supports his investiture and avoids an electoral repetition. A road that you already know will be riddled with mines. But the difficulty of the endeavor will not stop him.
Sánchez has, a priori, the express rejection of his investiture by the 171 deputies made up of the PP, Vox and UPN. A bloc of no to his re-election that the leader of the PSOE will seek to overcome with an absolute majority of 178 – or even 179 – seats in Congress.
But the leader of the PSOE already assumed yesterday, on the eve of today receiving the order from the King as planned, that the majority of possible allies for his investiture would come to the fore to announce that they will sell dearly their eventual support for the investiture, in case it is finally achieved.
Some statements that, in any case, did not at all surprise either the Moncloa or the leadership of the PSOE. All the possible members of a hypothetical bloc of yes to Sánchez’s re-election, logically, want to increase their support for the multi-party negotiations for the investiture. “It’s boring,” the socialists acknowledge.
It is not only a question, therefore, of ERC and specifically Junts entering the investiture equation, with the amnesty for those prosecuted for the process under study, despite the fact that the political and media focus of the negotiation is fixed on the independence movement. Catalan.
Even the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, and her spokesperson, Ernest Urtasun, agreed yesterday to increase the pressure and warned that “we are still far from reaching an agreement” with the PSOE, despite the fact that, in the event of investiture, a coalition government between both parties.
The political space to the left of the PSOE maintains its inveterate internal struggle, in any case. The spokesman for the Podemos executive, Pablo Fernández, came to question this pressure from Sumar on the PSOE to seal a programmatic agreement: “To launch orders, you have to be credible,” he warned Yolanda Díaz.
The PNV, as is its custom, avoided setting a position after the meeting that Aitor Esteban held with the King. But the Lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, recalled in an interview on Ser the non-compliance of the Sánchez Executive with the agreed transfer schedule. And he warned that, with the current parliamentary arithmetic, Sánchez will need “all the votes all the time” to be able to keep the legislature afloat.
“The votes must be won,” the BNG spokesperson, Ana Pontón, warned Sánchez yesterday. And she observed a certain “relaxation” in the PSOE regarding the negotiations for an eventual investiture of Sánchez, despite the fact that she warned that without concrete agreements on the Galician agenda, the Bloc will not support him.
In addition to the Catalan, Basque and Galician agenda, there is the Canarian agenda. The spokesperson for the Canarian Coalition, Cristina Valido, assured yesterday, after being received by the King in the Zarzuela, that there is currently no contact or open negotiation with the PSOE for the investiture. “We don’t know if we will be necessary,” Valido admitted, although she showed willingness to negotiate, despite her express rejection of the amnesty.
In Moncloa and the leadership of the PSOE, however, they do not rule out that CC could join the bloc of Sánchez’s investiture, despite the fact that it voted in favor of Feijóo’s. The majority would then rise to 179 votes in favor.
In this case, furthermore, a yes from the only CC deputy would allow Sánchez’s investiture only with the abstention of Junts. But in the PSOE they admit that a hypothetical support from the Canary Islands would not lower the negotiation with the party led by Carles Puigdemont. Junts consider that the price would be the same, without half measures. “Either Junts enters or it doesn’t,” they assume.
But in Moncloa they also highlight that, despite everyone raising their demands and alerts, no one closes the door, at least for now. And Sánchez is willing to play all the cards.
