It is premature to make predictions about what governance will be like in Spain by the end of the year. There are many unknowns and, as always in politics, there is never a lack of imponderables. The vast majority of citizens want to know who will be installed as Prime Minister and under what circumstances and, if not possible, when the next elections will be.
Everything else is rhetoric and will be part of the tug-of-war between the parties until there is a majority of deputies who vote in favor of a new president. Alberto Núñez Feijó knows that in a parliamentary regime it is not enough to win the elections if you do not get enough support in Parliament. For now, he does not reach the sum to be invested as president.
The same rule is known to Pedro Sánchez, who has begun to pick at a mosaic of diverse and distant parties to narrowly obtain the investiture. Speeches about who has won or who has lost the election will crash against the arithmetic. The electoral campaign is over and now we need to do politics, which will rest on the interests of small parties and their ideological drift.
If Sánchez gets an investiture it will have to be, according to his words, translating a social majority of progress into a parliamentary majority. It remains to be seen how he does. It will be at the cost of contradictions and budget promises and of handing over to independence everything that it puts on the table in the negotiations that have already begun.
Neither of the two major parties has noticed even though the elections have not been won by anyone strong enough to govern by themselves. There has been a slight strengthening of bipartisanship, with land shifting to the mainstream right and to some extent also to the Socialist Party. But the picture of the elections shows a Spain tied to itself, which, in turn, is unable to respond to the challenges historically posed by Catalonia and the Basque Country.
The tiebreaker, since Felipe González lost the absolute majority in 1993, has come from a few votes from Catalonia that are decisive to ensure the investiture and stability. The same thing happened in 1996 when José Maria Aznar gave Jordi Pujol everything he asked to get to Moncloa. The Majestic pacts were the transfer of powers with the most political weight since the Constitution of 1978. They included everything from the suppression of civilian governors to the deployment of the Mossos as a comprehensive Catalan police force.
The novelty of the July 23 elections is that they have given the key to governability to a party that wants to leave Spain. Carles Puigdemont has proclaimed a few days ago that, as leader of Junts, he does not want to hear anything from Pedro Sánchez, whom he has accused of not keeping his word. Since the former president of the Generalitat, installed in Waterloo since 2017 and formally required by Spanish justice for the events of October of that year, is essential to invest Sánchez.
The situation is between comic and surreal. It highlights the precariousness of the system if it is observed with the mentality of a single Spain and not as established in the preamble of the Constitution to “protect all Spaniards and the peoples of Spain in the exercise of human rights, their cultures and traditions, languages ??and institutions”. It is not so much about who the president is or even what party he is from, but how to govern a country with the high beams on and not acting in a hurry to win the favor of a handful of seats.
The immediate journey is difficult and complex, but not impassable. First, it is necessary to adhere to the rules of the game established in our parliamentary system, avoiding unconstitutional shortcuts. In second place is the observance of the division of powers as a basic element for political stability. Third, it is necessary to introduce the concept of territorial capillarity bearing in mind that Spain does not begin or end in greater Madrid and that outside its real or imaginary borders there is intelligent life.
Respect for the opponent is essential in these unstable times. Confrontation based on intransigence leads nowhere. Democratic politics tolerates all discrepancies, but never accepts fatality. The option of new elections is bad for everyone’s interest, but if the price of the investiture is abusive, the polls will have to be opened again. Carles Puigdemont has the floor today for today.
