It is hasty to make predictions about what governance will be like in Spain between now and the end of the year. There are many unknowns and, as always in politics, so many more imponderables. The vast majority of citizens want to know who will be sworn in as Prime Minister and under what circumstances and, if that is not possible, when the next elections will be.
The rest is rhetoric and will form part of the tug of war between the parties until there is a majority of deputies who vote in favor of a new president. Alberto Núñez Feijóo knows that in a parliamentary regime it is not enough to win the elections if sufficient support is not obtained in Parliament. For now the sum is not enough.
Pedro Sánchez knows the same rule, who has begun to peck at a mosaic of diverse and distant parties to barely obtain the investiture. The speeches about who has won or who has lost the elections will crash against arithmetic. The campaign has already finished and now it is necessary to do politics, which will rest on the interests of the small parties and their ideological drift.
If Sánchez obtains an investiture, it will have to be, according to his words, translating a social majority of progress into a parliamentary majority. We will have to see how he does it. It will be at the cost of contradictions and budgetary promises and deliver to the independence movement everything that it puts on the table.
Neither of the two major parties has yet realized that the elections have not been won by anyone strong enough to govern themselves. There has been a slight reinforcement of bipartisanship with a landslide towards the conventional right and to a lesser extent also towards the Socialist Party. But the photograph of the elections shows a Spain tied with itself, which, in turn, is incapable of responding to the challenges historically posed by Catalonia and the Basque Country.
The tiebreaker, since Felipe González lost the absolute majority in 1993, has come from a few votes from Catalonia that are decisive to ensure the investiture and stability. The same thing happened in 1996 when José María Aznar gave Jordi Pujol everything he asked for to get to Moncloa. The Majestic pacts were the most politically charged transfer of powers since the 1978 Constitution. They included everything from the suppression of civil governors to the deployment of the Mossos as the integral Catalan police force.
The novelty of the July 23 elections is that they have given the key to governance to a party that wants to leave Spain. Carles Puigdemont has proclaimed a few days ago that, as leader of Junts, he does not want to know anything about Pedro Sánchez, whom he has accused of not keeping his word. Well, the former president of the Generalitat, installed in Waterloo since 2017 and formally required by the Spanish justice for the events of October of that year, is essential to invest Pedro Sánchez.
The situation is somewhere between comical and surreal. It highlights the precariousness of the system if it is observed with the mentality of a single Spain and not as established in the preamble of the Constitution to “protect all Spaniards and peoples of Spain in the exercise of human rights, their cultures and traditions, languages ??and institutions”.
It is not so much a question of who the president is or even of what party he is, but of how a country is governed with the high beams on and without acting in a hurry to obtain the favor of a handful of seats.
The immediate route is difficult and complex, but not impassable. First you have to adhere to the rules of the game established in our parliamentary system, avoiding unconstitutional shortcuts. Second is the observance of the division of powers as a basic element for political stability. Third, introduce the concept of territorial capillarity taking into account that Spain does not begin or end in the great Madrid and that outside its real or imaginary borders there is intelligent life.
Respect for the opponent is essential in these unstable times. Democratic politics tolerates all disagreements, but never accepts fatality. The option of new elections is disastrous for the interest of all, although if the price of the investiture is abusive, the polls will have to be opened again.
