It came out at the last second… and it wasn’t easy”, one of the PSOE’s main negotiators admitted exhaustedly, showing traces of the tiring and tense day, after reaching the agreement with Junts that, already in the discount time, allowed Pedro Sánchez to save Wednesday the parliamentary validation of two of the first decrees of his new mandate.
The socialist negotiating team for this new impossible mission included María Jesús Montero, Félix Bolaños and Santos Cerdán. The organizing secretary of the PSOE, as recognized by both parties, was once again key – as in the negotiation of the investiture – to unblock the initial and persistent disagreement with Junts, which threatened, until the last second, of infringing a severe corrective to the Government. With the particularity that, this time, the leader from Navarre has been very unwell since Tuesday, with symptoms of flu and tenths of a fever, so he wore a mask during the twelve hours in which the convulsive plenary session lasted Wednesday in the Senate. “Sometimes you find interlocutors with whom you can speak honestly”, recognized Jordi Turull, general secretary of JxCat, with whom Cerdán already opened negotiations last week during his meeting in Barcelona.
The path began to clear when Vice President Montero invited Junts to explore counterparties on Monday. La Moncloa had offered Junts from the first moment to include their demands, via amendments, in the processing of the decrees as draft laws, but the sovereignist formation rejected this formula due to their distrust of the PSOE. However, he ended up assuming it when the battery of counterparties that the Government was willing to negotiate began to take shape.
Another decisive step, but not yet definitive, was the meeting held on Tuesday night in Moncloa between the two delegations. When the invitation arrived, it happened that Turull was already in Madrid. So Montero, Bolaños and Cerdán met with Turull, Miriam Nogueras and Albert Batet, a figure also very close to Carles Puigdemont.
They didn’t actually get together for dinner, but to negotiate. But in a break they were able to chop bread with ham and other foods. “Indeed, the night before we worked very intensively, I worked until very late and so did other PSOE colleagues, because we wanted the decrees to be approved”, Bolaños admitted yesterday. And the day’s talks were crowned by a video conference between Cerdán and Puigdemont.
The newly born legislature was not at stake, Bolaños admitted that the invitation for Sánchez to call another electoral advance for July if Junts vetoed the validation of the decrees was never on the table. What they did study in Moncloa was to withdraw the decrees before the vote, if the simple majority needed to approve them could not be gathered, before they were doomed to defeat. An old thesis among the current core of Sánchez warns that you cannot go to a vote to lose it.
But it was decided to go ahead because, despite the fact that JxCat remained determined to vote no, at the same time it was open to negotiating counterparts. “Nothing is broken, we continue to negotiate. And that Junts continues to sit at the table is a good sign”, emphasized Moncloa just 24 hours before the vote.
The fact is, however, that when Bolaños went up to the floor of the Senate, at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, the pact was not yet sealed. “We still have a few hours left to be able to achieve it”, confided the socialist negotiators, without having them all. In fact, as an alternative plan, the convening of an extraordinary Council of Ministers was already foreseen to review the measures contained in some decrees that seemed to be headed for repeal. Alarm spread in the PSOE, and irony began to circulate among some leaders, saving all the distance, that Sánchez thought he was negotiating with the Palestinian National Authority, when in reality he was in talks with.
But those last hours of heart attack until the vote bore fruit, the telephone bill of Bolaños and Cerdán skyrocketed, and there was an agreement. At the last second.
