The PNV spokesperson, Aitor Esteban, left the meeting with the acting president and candidate for the investiture, Pedro Sánchez, convinced of the PSOE’s “will to reach an agreement” but highlighting that this pact is not yet closed. There is no favorable vote for Pedro Sánchez at the moment, but also no skepticism about the possibility of achieving it. Of course, in addition to the specific matters that are closed in the investiture, the PNV wants to agree with the PSOE on a “mode of operation” for the legislature, so that the manners of the second half of the previous one are not repeated.
This prevention by Aitor Esteban responds to something that was a clamor almost since the second year of the legislature: the PNV did not like at all the PSOE’s way of negotiating, cut off from the rest of the political forces until the last 24 hours and trying to force the agreements in extremis, at the final whistle.
The anger of the Basque group in the successive negotiations with the coalition government was a constant in the previous mandate and Esteban wants to avoid at all costs to suffer this agonizing negotiation method again, which is why yesterday he included among the matters to be closed before the investiture both the what and the how.
Esteban was not very explicit as to what matters they have put on the table for the PSOE to close the investiture agreement and he did not want to commit the PNV for the entire legislature, as the socialists intend, but he did indicate that it would not be acceptable to give it to the president the confidence to then vote negatively on the general state budgets of 2024.
In this sense, Esteban celebrated that the president had invited the acting Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, to the meeting with the PNV spokesperson, who – he said – shares with him the quality of “speaking clearly.” Regarding the issues that the PNV wants to introduce to the negotiation, Esteban did not want to be explicit, for the benefit of the conversations, but he also commented that they are the usual ones, related both to self-government and to those matters of economic policy and social rights in which Basque nationalists have put the emphasis during the last legislature.
Asked specifically about the Housing Law, Esteban commented that his concerns about the invasion of jurisdiction do not hinder his concern about the need to reduce the “exorbitant” prices of rental housing, and added that the recently approved Housing Law will have to be adjusted to that is effective in the objectives pursued.
Although Esteban admitted that it makes no sense to make Sánchez president and then tie him hand and foot to start the legislature by rejecting the budgets, his group will not give a blank check for the entire legislature, as the PSOE claims. Néstor Rego, of the BNG, expressed himself in a similar sense, highlighting the willingness to reach an agreement detected among the socialists, although he did not take for granted the meaning of his vote.
The spokesperson for the socialist parliamentary group, Patxi López, for his part, agreed with the two spokespersons who met with Pedro Sánchez yesterday, that all parties have expressed the will to reach an agreement, but insisted that, from the very moment in which the King proposed to form a Government, Sánchez’s desire with these negotiations is not to achieve a favorable vote in the investiture vote but to reach an agreement that allows four years of “progressive Government.”
