The irritation in Moncloa and the PSOE leadership against Yolanda Díaz, whom they accuse of not wanting, not knowing, or not being able to intercede with Ada Colau to save Pere Aragonès’ budgets, is remarkable. The consequence of the veto of the commons on the accounts in Parliament is the haste of the Catalan elections on May 12, and the resignation of Pedro Sánchez in his desire to approve new State budgets for this 2024.
“It is very clear that he is not able to control his people”, complain the socialists with reference to Díaz. “Either that or no one understands their strategy”, government sources point out. “It’s what a confederation should be”, concluded Ferraz about the multi-national space headed by the second vice-president of the Executive, Minister of Labor and leader of Sumar.
The gap between the members of the current government coalition, the PSOE and Sumar, widens just one hundred days after it was formed. And it rains, moreover, on wet, because the socialists also accused Díaz of not having been able to manage his political and even personal clash with Podemos, which further weakened the space to the left of the PSOE with its break with Sumar and his exit to the mixed group in Congress.
Díaz herself expressed yesterday her disagreement with Sánchez’s order to renounce the 2024 budgets. A decision she assured that she did not share, “obviously”, since, in her opinion, it is necessary to continue working “for the common good” of the country. The leader of Sumar revealed that the two coalition partners were meeting on Wednesday, in the midst of negotiating the accounts, when “Moncloa decided not to continue with the budgets”. “Sumar knows that it was not possible”, replied the first vice-president and deputy general secretary of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero.
From Sumar, however, they criticized Sánchez’s “unilateral decision”, which they described as “wrong”. The socialist spokesman, Patxi López, stepped in and defended that there is no point in trying to promote a budget when the electoral campaign already launched in Catalonia will prevent the indispensable support of the pro-independence formations, Junts and ERC, which now only have the objective of having them with the PSC before the meeting with both ballot boxes.
“The elections in Catalonia are shifting the political map”, warned Patxi López. “We all know how this works, so it’s better not to make efforts that lead to melancholy”, he alleged. In Moncloa they justify Sánchez’s decision as “an exercise in political realism”, and insist on thinking about the 2025 accounts already. Because they emphasize that the mandate is not at risk. “The legislature will last, so that no one deduces that this will endanger the stability of the Government”, they say.
The consequence is a rarefied and attrition atmosphere among the Government partners. The barrage of criticism against Sumar, from the PSOE and from the ERC, unnerves the multinational group, which, without microphones, labels the “excessive overacting” of some and others to blame the others – in this case the group of Díaz – of “his own evils and mistakes”.
