Lacking the political capacity to forge majorities, the two great Spanish parties only have tactics and short dribbling left to weave a story that positions them well in one of the possible future scenarios. The great objective of Alberto Núñez Feijóo is for us to remember that he has been the winner of the elections, but it is very possible that this victory will only serve to be the leader of the opposition. After being proposed by the King to form a government, he begins a round of contacts whose main purpose is to be able to fill a few minutes on the news. The numbers don’t work out. Relying on Vox is a bad card in the game that is now being played.
This week Pedro Sánchez and Núñez Feijóo have met. As expected, it was only a pretext so that each one could clinch their position. The popular has insisted on the mantra of letting the force with the most votes rule, even if it is only for two years. The socialist has stressed that, in the absence of a majority of the adversary, he is entitled to try to complete a puzzle that allows him to be re-elected as president of the government.
The PP’s options for gaining an absolute majority go only through getting the PNV to make a 180-degree turn in its position, something extremely complicated now that the Basque nationalists have to defend a place that the independentistas of EH Bildu are disputing against them. All Feijóo’s attempts to be president are, then, a trip to nowhere. And once that reality is verified, a new act will begin in this play. Once the inauguration of the popular leader fails, all the gunpowder will be spent on delegitimizing the pact for losers that the socialists will attempt.
Today, the PP’s media speakers have taken a break, waiting for events to unfold, but the political language of the right and the extreme right will once again flourish in all its splendor when necessary. We will get tired of hearing that Pedro Sánchez’s options to become president go through putting communists, pro-independence, pro-philoetarras, nationalists, seditious and fugitives from justice in the shaker of pacts, and that the price that is set to keep the chair de la Moncloa consists of breaking Spain and submitting to blackmail.
It is difficult to know what is the political price that Pedro Sánchez is willing to pay to obtain his investiture. Its main negotiating force lies in the political price that the parties would eventually pay that, if they do not achieve what they propose, end up forcing an electoral repetition, and it is here that the two Catalan independence parties, Esquerra and Junts, will have to sharpen the pencil well to Maximize your bargaining power.
Pedro Sánchez has already given signs on more than one occasion of traveling down paths that most analysts would rule out. Nobody or almost nobody would have believed, when the previous legislature began in 2019, that he would be willing to pay the political price of the pardons and the repeal of the crime of sedition from the Penal Code, but he did. And it is evident that he did it out of pure necessity for political survival, no matter how much, once the decision was made, he wanted to make a virtue of necessity and present as desirable something that, if he could have avoided it, he would never have done.
Now, the bar that the Catalan independence parties point to him is that of amnesty and referendum. Both are two political concepts that require a legal translation to take shape. We will see what the negotiation yields, but we must never forget that what the Spanish Courts legislate always ends up at the table of the Constitutional Court, which has become a sort of third chamber in which great political consensus can get bogged down. as it happened, for example, with the Statute of Catalonia of 2006, and leave everything on paper. Perhaps for this reason it should also be considered to modify the TC law so that it cannot interfere in political agreements that arise from parliamentary majorities.
Esquerra and Junts add up to 14 deputies, all of them absolutely decisive, who, by playing the cards well, can achieve important achievements in the political, economic and social agenda of Catalonia during the four years of the legislature that could now begin. Let’s hope that the country’s strategy prevails over partisan tactics and that the opportunity that arithmetic gives, conjuncturally, is not wasted.
