If in the previous legislature the policy, driven by the coalition government of PSOE and Unides Podem, focused on implementing an ambitious social agenda, now everything indicates that it will be the territorial agenda that will dominate Spanish politics. Consequently, the new government of progress led by Pedro Sánchez, as long as it manages to harmonize all the interests, requests and priorities of the various parties that must support it to achieve the investiture, will have to adopt this displacement of the social axis towards in the territory
On July 27, Andoni Ortuzar, president of the PNV, stated: “We will have to make a global approach on what it wants during these four years, especially in the territorial area and the fit between the national realities of the Basque Country and Catalonia “. A statement that was clarified in more detail by Lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu in an article published in El País. It raised the formula of the “constitutional convention” with the aim of defining aspects such as “the self-government of rural communities or, even, of historical nationalities”. On August 18, EH Bildu deputy Merxe Aizpurua declared in the Congress of Deputies that “there is a structural issue in the Spanish State, which has been going on since 1978, where, in some way, this State was drawn of the autonomies that was coffee for everyone and does not respond to the needs of Euskal Herria nor does it solve the problems of the rest”.
Both Junts per Catalunya and ERC propose that the State give legal cover to a self-determination referendum. The request of both parties for the PSOE to promote an amnesty for the crimes arising from the process must be read in a territorial key, since the crimes of which they are accused are the result of trying to change the territorial relationship between Catalonia and Spain, in promoting and holding the illegal referendum on October 1, 2017. All nationalist and pro-independence parties, without exception, raise territorial demands that go far beyond those raised by María Jesús Montero, Minister of Finance in functions, when he declared on August 1 that it was an “urgency” to review the regional financing model and look for formulas to make the current territorial model more efficient.
The nationalist and pro-independence parties have been promoting initiatives for decades with the intention of political pedagogy or creating scenarios for a break with the Spanish State. In the political proposal of the Barcelona Declaration of 1998, promoted by the BNG, PNV and CiU, it was possible to read: “After twenty years of democracy, the articulation of the Spanish state as a plurinational state remains unresolved. During this period we have suffered from a lack of juridico-political recognition and even of social and cultural acceptance of our respective national realities at the level of the State”.
In January 2005, the Ibarretxe plan, which proposed that “the exercise of the right of the Basque people to decide their own future”, sought that Euskadi cease to be an autonomous community to become a free associated state, which implied that Spain assumed the territorial reality of a confederal State. In 2017, pro-independence parties shaped the illegal 1-O referendum, which asked citizens: Do you want Catalonia to be an independent state in the form of a republic? In a way, these three political initiatives are converging, now, to warn that the time has come to lay the political foundations for a fundamental territorial change in Spain.
The situation in which the PSOE and Sumar find themselves in order to re-edit their coalition government is paradoxical; both are in favor of moving towards a new territorial organization and are inclined to seek the best legal formula for Catalan independence to integrate into Spanish political life, but, nevertheless, they now find themselves sharing the independenceist illusions centered to create the political bases to be able to separate from Spain. The key issue in the negotiation that is now starting to invest Pedro Sánchez is to check whether he and his party are able to impose political limits on themselves so as not to fall into the spiral of the demands of Basque and Catalan independence, and convince Catalan independence that the territorial question must be tackled gradually and beyond one legislature.
