Allies were essential to be invested and to rule. Pedro Sánchez turned to Unides Podemos with an effusive embrace with Pablo Iglesias despite having assured that he would not accept him in his government because of nightmare issues. I don’t think Sánchez had in mind Churchill’s loneliness in the face of Hitler’s bombings in 1940 when he said that “the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is trying to win it without allies”. Democracy’s first coalition government was out of necessity. Sánchez won 120 seats in November 2019 and could only govern with allies. Parliamentary logic demanded it.
The PSOE chose an alliance partner that has turned out to be more uncomfortable than expected and, above all, more demanding in social engineering policies that led Sánchez to abandon the centrality of social democracy.
In addition to Unides Podemos, they joined the government entourage ERC and Bildu who supported budgets and laws whose content did not share some of the old socialist glories. The dismissals of Carmen Calvo and José Luis Ãbalos were not politically justified. The silence of Felipe González and the criticisms of Alfonso Guerra have had an implicit political weight. The only baron who timidly but publicly opposed the Podemite-inspired policies of the Sánchez government was the Mancheque GarcÃa-Page, who is also the only one who withstood Sunday’s popular storm and will continue to govern with an absolute majority.
It is true that there is no coalition culture in Spanish governments. The first experiment was not done with weeks or months of previous discussions and definition of programs as is usually done in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium or Sweden. It was achieved hastily and without specifying too much, giving the coalition and fellow travelers a foothold to improvise laws and decrees that were not in the electoral proposals of the socialists. The battle in today’s democracies is fought more in a cultural war than in an attempt to get closer to the real concerns of the people.
Pedro Sánchez’s response to Sunday’s socialist electoral defeat is a tactical political reaction by a strategist whose survival has withstood all kinds of adversity. Their Resilience Handbook published in 2019 is their go-to road map.
With his unexpected and anticipated call I suppose he intends to deactivate the soul engineers of Podemos – an expression that Maksim Gorki used when he taught European intellectuals the wonders of Stalin’s Russia – and at the same time reduce the euphoria of Núñez Feijóo and DÃaz Ayuso for the resounding popular victory. I suspect that he will continue to need allies but he will want to tie them shorter and not to rewrite his speeches with unexpected initiatives. Disagreements within a coalition are logical and inevitable. But they don’t air in public one day but the other too.
The same thing can happen to Feijóo in the hypothesis that he wins the July 23 elections without a majority. Or coalition with Vox or govern adrift. Everything has a price and sometimes it is high, unaffordable. It will be seen.
Sánchez’s bold and perhaps reckless gesture is a political exit after defeat. The same could be demanded of Oriol Junqueras and Pere Aragonès after the electoral setback of ERC which, let’s not forget, only has 33 of the 135 seats to govern Catalonia. In a parliamentary system this precariousness cannot be sustained. Here it seems to be so.
