The favorable vote of the PNB and the BNG for Pedro Sánchez is not yet decided, despite the fact that both confirm the negotiating will of the Socialists. Candidate Pedro Sánchez said, immediately after receiving the King’s mandate to form a government, that he was not looking for a favorable vote just for the investiture, but a stability agreement for a government program for the whole legislature and, although no one wants to give a blank check to the Spanish Executive, the PNB and the BNG, whose spokesmen met yesterday with Sánchez in Congress, are also looking for a pact of greater depth and scope.
The spokesman of the PNB, Aitor Esteban, expressed it in two ways, one with the wind in his favor and another across: on the one hand, he commented that it would make no sense to vote in favor of the investiture and immediately afterwards reject the general State budgets for 2024, which would leave the Executive without the tools to start walking. PNB will do no such thing, he assured. If you vote for a president, it is for him to rule. On the other hand, in addition to the matters of a political nature that he intends to negotiate with the PSOE from next week to facilitate the investiture, the Jeltzales want to include in the pact a “mode of operation” for the entire legislature.
This allusion is not futile and is loaded with intention: the PNB began to be uncomfortable with the negotiation methods of the legislative initiatives of the coalition Government from the second year of the previous legislature. First, in circles of trust and then in a more explicit and public way, Basque nationalists expressed their growing discomfort with the agonizing method of functioning of the Executive, which did not convene its supposed legislative partners until at the last minute on many of the initiatives and asked for a quick vote leaving little or no room for calm negotiation of each measure. This modus operandi made the Jeltzales uncomfortable and put the spokesman in a very bad mood on several occasions, who denounced it from the podium of Congress warning that the PNB’s patience had a limit. That’s why they don’t want it to happen again. Esteban insisted yesterday that his group wants to agree with the socialists on an operating mechanism for the legislature that puts an end to these practices. He did not want to enter into the specific matters that will be negotiated, although he advanced that, as usual, the PNB will emphasize self-government and the fulfillment of previous agreements. He did comment sarcastically on Sumar’s hyperactivity in the amnesty matter: “There are those who want to be the parsley in all the sauces, and the more hands there are in the pot, the harder it is to cook.”
It was also congratulated that Sánchez decided to include in his meeting the acting Minister of Finance, the Andalusian María Jesús Montero, with whom, he said, he shares that they both speak “very clearly”. And he remembered that it is often said that the Treasury is the government within the government.
The spokesperson of the BNG in the Congress, Néstor Rego, agreed with Esteban in detecting a sincere desire of the socialists to negotiate an agreement with all the indispensable partners and was, at least, in this sense, optimistic. Rego did expressly ask the president, he later explained in a press conference, that any agreement on a new territorial model that is reached for Catalonia include Galicia in its status as a nation, recognized in the constitutional text. Rego specified that with this he did not intend to link the situation of Catalonia with that of Galicia, but that it should be considered in any redesign of the territorial structure of the State.
At the end of the day in which Sánchez also met with a group of non-governmental organizations, the socialist spokesman in Congress, Patxi López, appeared before the press to celebrate the desire for an agreement expressed by the spokesmen of the PNB and the BNG in their respective meetings with the acting president. “It will be from Monday when we will sit down with all the groups to negotiate the specific agreements”, explained López who, however, was satisfied to have found in both the previous will that the agreements reached, as Sánchez claimed, can give stability to “four years of a progressive government”.
