“I am very happy,” Pedro Sánchez acknowledged this Thursday, upon his arrival at the summit of the European Political Community that brings together fifty heads of State and Government in Granada, before it is held on the same stage this Friday. the meeting of the informal European Council, which are the great milestones of the Spanish presidency of the community club, after, in addition, Spain has been designated, along with Portugal and Morocco, for the Soccer World Cup in 2030. All of these circumstances have highlighted by the acting head of the Executive, they grant Spain “an extra European and international recognition.”
But when the lights of the Granada summits go out, Sánchez will have to resume the difficult route towards his re-election as President of the Government, which he has recognized will not be easy at all to articulate a majority for the investiture and the rest of the legislature. “The negotiations are complex,” he has assumed. Which, most likely, will delay the investiture times, no matter how much haste the PSOE leader insists on imposing on the process. Most likely, the investiture debate cannot be held, if nothing goes wrong, until the end of this month of October or the beginning of November.
“We have lost five weeks with an investiture that even the candidate himself knew was going to be a failure,” Sánchez highlighted, in reference to the failed investiture of the leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. “And now Spanish society, and I first, what we want is for there to be a Government with full functions, and for us to not be in office, as we have been since the elections on July 23,” he assured. Therefore, he stressed, “there is an urgency for there to be a Government with full functions.”
But he has also recognized that the process for his investiture will not be as quick as he would have liked. “The negotiations are complex, because there is a parliamentary arc with different interests,” Sánchez admitted about the difficulty of the endeavor. “We all have to find that meeting space to start this legislature and be able to form a parliamentary majority, which not only gives us an investiture, but also the legislature,” he confided.
“My goal is that during these next four years we continue to advance for the social majority of our country, in rights, freedoms and progress,” Sánchez remarked. And he has also advocated for “continuing to cultivate and promote reunion and coexistence between the peoples of Spain, within the framework of the Constitution.” “Dialogue is the method, the objective is progress and coexistence, and the framework is the Constitution. That is where we are going to move,” he highlighted. Being very aware of the complexity of the challenge. “I am not a new President of the Government, I have been in office for five years now, and this is what I have done over the last five years, in extraordinarily complex circumstances such as those we have experienced and which fortunately we have already overcome, such as Covid,” he highlighted.
Asked whether there will be an amnesty or not for those prosecuted by the process, according to the lawsuit being studied by Junts and ERC to support his investiture, Sánchez has admitted that “I know that that is the question that is asked of me, they even tell me that for I’m not referring to it directly.” But he has insisted that it is not yet time to set a position, until the negotiations with the Catalan independence movement are completed. “We are negotiating with different parliamentary groups,” he alleged.
Sánchez, however, has once again used the effects of the pardons for the imprisoned leaders of the process, approved in the last legislature. “When the Government of Spain approved the pardons, I was confident that they would contribute to the stability and normalization of politics in Catalonia. And today I am certain that it was a good decision, and that therefore it obeyed a general interest, which is the interest that must be safeguarded not only by those of us who have the honor of leading a country, from the executive branch, but also by all parliamentary forces,” he argued. “We are negotiating, and when we have a concrete position on the matter, after meeting with all parliamentary groups, we will establish the position of the PSOE,” he concluded.
