“It came out at the last second… and it hasn’t been easy,” acknowledged one of the PSOE’s main negotiators, exhausted, evidencing traces of the tiring and tense day, after reaching the agreement with Junts that, already in injury time, It allowed Pedro Sánchez to save last Wednesday the parliamentary validation of two of the first decrees of his new mandate.
The socialist negotiating team for this new impossible mission was made up of María Jesús Montero, Félix Bolaños and Santos Cerdán. The organizational secretary of the PSOE, as recognized by both parties, was once again key – as in the investiture negotiation – to unblock the initial and persistent disagreement with Junts that threatened, until the last second, with violating a severe corrective to the Government. With the particularity that, on this occasion, the Navarrese leader had already been feeling very ill since Tuesday, with flu symptoms and tenths of fever, which is why he wore a mask during the twelve hours in which the full convulsion held was prolonged. Wednesday in the Senate. “Sometimes you find interlocutors with whom you can speak honestly,” acknowledged Jordi Turull, general secretary of JxCat, with whom Cerdán already opened negotiations last week at his meeting in Barcelona.
The path began to be cleared when last Monday Vice President Montero invited Junts to explore counterparts. Moncloa had offered Junts from the beginning to include their demands, via amendments, in the processing of the decrees as bills, but the sovereigntist party rejected this formula due to its distrust of the PSOE. However, he ended up assuming it when the battery of counterparts 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 at the Moncloa between both delegations. When the invitation arrived, it happened that Turull was already in Madrid –Junts sources point out that he was there for reasons unrelated to the negotiation and that the coincidence occurred. So Montero, Bolaños and Cerdán met with Turull, Miriam Nogueras and Albert Batet, a figure also very close to Carles Puigdemont.
In reality they didn’t get together for dinner, but to negotiate. Although during a break they were able to snack on bread with ham and other sustenance. “Indeed, the night before we worked very intensely, I worked until very late and so did other PSOE colleagues, because we wanted the decrees to be approved,” Bolaños acknowledged yesterday. And the intense conversations of the day were crowned by a video conference held by Cerdán and Puigdemont.
The newly born legislature was not at stake, Bolaños acknowledged that the order for Sánchez to call another early election for July if Junts vetoed the validation of the decrees was never on the table. What was considered in the Moncloa was to withdraw the decrees before the vote, if the simple majority necessary for their approval could not be met, before being doomed to such a parliamentary defeat. An old thesis among Sánchez’s current hard core warns that you cannot go to a vote to lose it.
But it was decided to move forward because, despite the fact that JxCat was still stuck in voting no, at the same time it was open to negotiating compensation. “Nothing is broken, we continue negotiating. And that Junts is still sitting at the table is a good sign,” they highlighted in the Moncloa just 24 hours before the vote.
The truth, however, is that when Bolaños took the Senate stage, on Wednesday at 9 a.m., the pact had not yet been sealed. “We still have a few hours left to achieve this,” confided the socialist negotiators, without having it all together. In fact, the convening of an extraordinary Council of Ministers was already being considered as an alternative plan to review the measures contained in some decrees that seemed still headed for repeal. Alarm spread in the PSOE, and among some leaders the irony began to circulate, bridging all gaps, that Sánchez thought he was negotiating with the Palestinian National Authority, when in reality he was in talks with Hamas.
But those last heart-stopping hours until the vote bore fruit, Bolaños and Cerdán’s telephone bill skyrocketed, and there was an agreement. At the last second. However, in the first vote Junts did not participate because there was no signed document with what was agreed. Since the vote on the anti-crisis decree had to be repeated, with a text that both parties have promised not to leak already signed, JxCat did participate in the vote. And he abstained. The result was the same, validated decrees.