Sánchez is divisive and enjoys being so. So was his inauguration speech. Without concession of any kind to those who will be his opposition. Democrats, his own and those who are next to him. Anti-democrats, the rest. Without nuances. A well-armed trap, but a trap.
The first forty minutes were a permanent pricking of the pain nerve of the popular ones. Piss them off. Draw them as Siamese brothers from Vox. Feijóo is for Sánchez an ambassador of Trumpism in Spain, of the illiberal way of doing politics. The heritage of the extreme right, attributed to the right.
Putting conservatives and reactionaries in the same bag was essential for Pedro Sánchez. In addition, baiting the trap is very easy because they serve bait in bulk. There are the PP-Vox pacts in autonomous communities and cities. Or the outbursts of some popular voices that perhaps should join Abascal’s party or Mariano Rajoy’s inexplicable support for the Argentine candidate Javier Milei.
Putting the PP in the bag of Trumpist national populism allows Sánchez to give meaning to the phrase with which he intends to establish the initial framework of the legislature: making necessity a virtue. The need? Stop red-hot Trumpism. The virtue? Daring to do it with the amnesty law and the pacts with ERC and Junts to save the flag of leftism. But the truth is that Sánchez’s only indisputable need was to continue being president.
Progress versus reactionism. Environmentalism against murderers of the planet. Feminism against machismo. Rights against cuts. Binomials with which Pedro Sánchez justified the amnesty and the agreements with the independentists in his speech. The agenda of the reunion and coexistence were only light filler. Yesterday Sánchez conveyed to the Spaniards that his pact with the “bad guys” is only to avoid the “worst ones.”
But his speech was incomplete. He forgot about self-determination, about the international validators who will oversee the meetings between the PSOE and Junts in Switzerland and other issues that the independence movement has raised to give the green light to the investiture. Sánchez did not want to dwell on the elephant, but there were two pachyderms in the chamber. Each one, with seven deputies.
The president spoke of the amnesty as if it were a beginning and end of the concessions to the independentists. And it is true that this worked for him during the last legislature with the pardons because ERC agreed to compensate for the failure of the State-Generalitat negotiation table with Rufián’s powerful speech. But unless Puigdemont has decided to deceive Junts voters, on this occasion the PSOE will not be able to take refuge in the multicolored progressive flag. And the focus of the legislature – beyond the amnesty – will be on the independence agenda. And this means more concessions or a failed legislature.
Sánchez already knows at this point that expressions such as the “reunion agenda”, with which he justifies the amnesty, are for Carles Puigdemont, and also for ERC due to the carry-over effect caused by the first, a nonsense. So neither feminism, nor the environment, nor the minimum wage, nor promising gold and silver in social rights, are going to divert the focus from the independence agenda.
The leader of the PSOE acts politically with the wisdom of the survivor when he thinks, like Julio César, that “when we reach that river, we will cross that bridge.” But you will be reminded every minute that the manager of the river flow on this occasion is Puigdemont. And he will be the one to decide how rough he wants the waters to go and if the bridge and Julius Caesar end up swallowed by the current before their time. Furthermore, with Junts he will not be able to count on the most arch-progressive agenda either.
If the negotiation has been difficult, the legislature will be even more so. If the president trusts everything to the fact that all of his investiture partners endure four years behind a shield against the right to the tune of Bella ciao and “They will not pass,” the engine of the new government will seize up in two news programs. All the more reason, with the Catalan elections just a stone’s throw away and ERC and Junts competing as always – but with greater bitterness – for the top scorer of independence orthodoxy.
