Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz showed yesterday their best smiles and gestures of great complicity when signing the programmatic agreement reached between the PSOE and Sumar, to try to convey the image that a progressive government coalition between the two formations will be more cohesive and will not suffer as many internal dissensions as the current one between the socialists and Unides Podemos.
“This time we will do it even better”, assured Sánchez. “We will govern better”, corroborated Díaz at the event that they both starred in at the Queen Sofia Museum, in the presence of a good part of the members of the current Executive in office… and with the prominent absences of the ministers of We can, Ione Belarra and Irene Montero.
“Spain will not stop before anything or anyone”, proclaimed Sánchez. The leader of the PSOE wanted to guarantee that there will be four more years of progressive government, despite the fact that his re-election as head of the Executive still depends on finally obtaining a parliamentary majority with the support of ERC, Junts, Bildu, the PNB and the BNG, and despite the fact that a date for the investiture has not yet been set.
Sánchez remarked that the current progressive coalition Executive, established in 2019 for the first time in democracy, “was given two days” to live, but that it managed to approve three consecutive general State budgets and more than 200 laws with an absolute majority. “And we’ll be there for another four years!” assured the socialist leader, despite the fact that he still does not have the support, singularly, of Catalan independence.
“A lot has been done in these four years, but there is still a lot to do”, warned Sánchez. “What has been done is not enough, there are still many injustices to be resolved”, he insisted.
And he pledged to “consolidate the path of progress and coexistence” in Spain, without any express mention of the political conflict in Catalonia, as it also does not appear in the programmatic agreement signed between the PSOE and Sumar, which includes 230 important initiatives social, fiscal and labor.
Sánchez, in any case, emphasized that with this coalition pact he wants to offer “stability, coexistence and progress in Spain over the next four years”. “We have the project, the enthusiasm, the ideas and the teams to advance more and more quickly, in addition to the experience of cooperating in a coalition government,” the socialist leader stressed.
Díaz, who spoke before the president, explained that the agreement “starts from the deep conviction that our only heritage is the things we do to make our time and our land better” and, therefore, “it is a government agreement born with the same convictions: it serves to serve, its only purpose is to improve the lives of Spaniards, to make us more equal and, therefore, to make us freer”.
Díaz stopped at the disputed concept: “Freedom is not the field of who can, we have shown it in the pandemic; freedom is to protect people, as we did during the pandemic; freedom is not the jungle, it is the rights that guarantee it”.
The acting vice-president – “the vice”, Sánchez came to call her at one point in her speech – detailed the contents of the agreement in labor, fiscal, climate and social matters, for which she expressly gave the thanks to the captains of the negotiation teams, Nacho Álvarez and María Jesús Montero.
And he emphasized that the agreed document applies the voter’s mandate: “The Spanish did not vote just to prevent Feijóo from being president and Abascal vice president, they voted to support the public policies based on social justice of the last legislature, to continue the path of social progress and have a new territorial agreement”.
The Spanish voted on 23-J, Díaz assured, “to be happier and freer”.
