Pedro Sánchez has chosen to smoke a shisha in Marrakesh to show that the ideal summer, geopolitics aside, is laziness. The white cap and sunglasses with which the acting president walks around the neighboring country, a very Obama style, are a perfect frame to encapsulate the political message he wants to convey to us: everything is under control. Would I, Peter the Great, be haggling for prices in the bazaars if I had doubts about my future? He seems, the president, a relaxed man. But between appearance and being there is an entire universe to be woven. And his men and women have begun to knit it while the boss is idle at the house of the now Moroccan friend. Salvador Illa with the cancellation of the debt of the communities with the State acquired through the Autonomous Liquidity Fund, or the Minister of Finance and Public Function, María Jesús Montero, with the now pressing need to negotiate a new autonomous financing system, These are just two examples of how the PSOE is baiting the longlines with which it aspires to capture the multiple supports it needs to win the Congress Table on the 17th and the subsequent inauguration.
In turn, the fish –as in fables, here the animals speak– openly demand what is the bait they will gladly bite to be captured. The PNB scorpion, a new territorial model for Spain; the ERC hake, what the PNV and Junts eat, subtracting what the principle of reality sees fit to impose; the monkfish of Bildu, supposedly the good will; the conger of Podemos, at least one ministry, etc. An à la carte fattening.
There are many baits that the PSOE has to prepare. A different one for each fish. But regardless of what is said (yesterday the hake Marta Rovira wanted to make it clear that Sánchez is not assured of the Republican votes), all these catches are taken for granted. Some want to fish and others to be fished. It is a guaranteed longline: so many hooks are baited, so many fish will end up on deck.
The difference is made by the bluefish of Spanish politics: Junts. Jaw, teeth and aggressiveness prevent its capture with conventional fishing lines. It is a fish that gives trouble, especially when it stings. Its name in Catalan, tallahams (hook cutter), explains why. Part even wire fishing lines.
Despite the difficulty, the task of throwing groundbait into the sea with the aim of attracting it has begun. Those who are dispatching the first batch of bait are the minister of the presidency, Félix Bolaños, and the former president of the government José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, converted into a valuable sherpa of sanchismo. Junts’ most pragmatic bluefish have already smelled the fattening. And they are convinced that it is worth swimming near the socialist boat to take the bait and let them ride when appropriate.
The conversations with Bolaños and Zapatero from the lateral environments of Junts, much more receptive than their general when listening to non-maximalist scenarios, explore the bases of what could become a formal negotiation. And they are also useful for the more pragmatic faction of Junts to have some pressure tool in the internal battle that Puigdemont’s party always ends up embarking on when he has to make an important decision.
Catalan tax agency, weighty reforms in the field of the judiciary without counting on the right, definitive shielding of the Catalan language (the umpteenth), substantial improvement in financing, criminal surgical reforms that allow the effects of an amnesty without carrying that name and the continuation of the negotiating table to make it lead to a vote in Catalonia that endorses a new territorial agreement, but that would not even remotely have anything to do with the alleged right to self-determination. To those who have years and memory this will sound: an ambitious Majestic pact. State-of-the-art advanced autonomy.
Enough for the pragmatic junteros, the most sensitive and prone to landing in the world of the practical, tangible and perhaps possible. But insufficient, by all accounts, for Puigdemont. And he is the only specimen that is of interest, since in his hands is any negotiation scenario. And the truth is that at this point he seems to have little bait and worse line for the Girona bluefish which, like Sánchez, is also on vacation. Sharpening the teeth and strengthening the jaw: amnesty and self-determination. It will be a catch worth watching.
