Ángel Collado
After the setback in the regional elections in Madrid and the resurgence of the right as a government alternative in the polls, a new front is opening up for Pedro Sánchez, this time among his allies, with the pact of the pro-independence parties to remain at the head of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
The failure of another operation directed from La Moncloa, the so-called “Illa effect”, is confirmed, while the parties of the half-imprisoned Oriol Junqueras (ERC) and the fugitive from justice Carles Puigdemont (JxCat) agree to reactivate their challenge to the unity of Spain from the autonomous Executive.
From next month, Sánchez will have to face exactly what he wanted to avoid by launching his health minister, Salvador Illa, into the race for the presidency of the Generalitat. He only managed to tie on seats with ERC and the separatist parties have not taken him into account at all. Strengthened in their hegemony and with the help of the anti-system group CUP, they are already asking for a date (this June) to start negotiating with the government a referendum and an amnesty that they know to be unconstitutional so that their leaders, convicted by the Supreme Court of sedition, embezzlement and disobedience, can go free.
The composition and the project of this new Catalan nationalist executive, openly tutored from outside by Junqueras and Puigdemont, force the President of the Government to hold a dialogue, in principle impossible because it affects national sovereignty, and which Sánchez will try to change, as always, with his offer of a new statute of autonomy as an alternative to the separatists’ own republic project.
The two pro-independence parties collaborated decisively to bring the Socialist leader to power through the censure motion against Mariano Rajoy in 2018. ERC, together with Bildu, abstained after the 2019 elections to make Sánchez’s investiture as president possible with the votes in favour of Podemos, the Basque nationalists and other regional parties.
The first problem for Sánchez with the start of negotiations with the ‘new’ Generalitat is the attrition that any concession could cause him in the eyes of national public opinion. But at the same time, it will also have an effect on his slim parliamentary majority. ERC’s 13 MPs, which are usually associated with Bildu’s 5, are decisive for any project. And they could be even more so if they incorporate the 8 MPs that the Catalan nationalists have.
The president of the government is left with no more fixed support in a 350-member House than the 120 seats of the PSOE plus the 35 of Podemos. The PNV (6 deputies) has just taken its first bill with the ceding of competence over prisons and prefers to distance itself from the left on economic proposals. The executive has a particularly complicated parliamentary panorama for the coming months in the decisive projects for the rest of the legislature, which are precisely economic in nature: budgets, tax reform, labour reform and pensions.
Sánchez, who dreamed of establishing a stable relationship with ERC, even of sharing power in the Generalitat with the pro-independence leftists, or at least breaking the bloc of separatist parties, finds himself in Congress with allies determined to raise the price of their support. To begin with, they are demanding a pardon for Junqueras and the other coup prisoners, which he was already preparing on a legal level despite the clash with the judiciary and in his sale to public opinion. The elections in Madrid and the latest polls indicate that the cost for the president of the Government may be greater than what was predicted in La Moncloa just two months ago.
