Ángel Collado
Pedro Sánchez is securing another year in power with his latest favour for Catalan independence supporters, effectively suppressing the crime of sedition committed by his main bosses in the separatist attempt on 1 October 2017, but also destabilising his own party: the PSOE.
The opposition accuses the president of the government of disarming the State and going against the rulings of the Supreme Court, while some socialist leaders join in the denunciation. They are the first to go to the polls in the municipal and regional elections next May and they fear they will pay the price for the wear and tear.
The Executive will have no problem in the Congress of Deputies to further alleviate the accounts with Justice of those mainly responsible for the coup against constitutional unity. The extreme left included in the social-communist cabinet and all the pro-independence groups in the Chamber ensure a comfortable and rapid parliamentary procedure for the announced reform of the Penal Code that will make sedition a lesser crime, as Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña, the party that now presides over the Catalan Executive, demanded.
Podemos and the separatist parties share the goal of liquidating the current constitutional model and anything that serves to dismantle national unity counts on their votes, the same ones that brought Sánchez to power in the 2018 motion of censure. This same majority is what sustains the government in exchange for facilitating their respective political projects, which in the case of ERC is the secession of Catalonia after the full political rehabilitation of all its leaders condemned for the attempt four years ago.
If the continuity of the head of the Executive depends on his compliance with the demands of his separatist partners, there are leaders in his party who consider that these concessions go against the PSOE’s commitment to the Constitution and against the party’s own interests. The Socialist presidents of the regional governments of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García Page, and Aragón, Javier Lambán, are the ones who have spoken most clearly.
Both leaders have been unequivocal, although this time they have toughened their tone. “We are in the midst of an escalation of prices and the only thing that is going to become cheaper is the attack on the Constitution”, was Page’s first reaction.
Lambán commented that Sánchez already knew of his total opposition to repealing the crime of sedition for the benefit of the separatists and also recalled that the previous government, that of the PP with Rajoy at the helm, gave the appropriate response to the attempt in Catalonia, that it did so with the logical support of the PSOE and that the Supreme Court knew how to “perfectly calibrate what had happened” when it condemned those responsible.
The end of the crime of sedition, which will be approved in Congress in parallel and with the same support as the General State Budget that guarantees Sánchez another safe year in government, also proves the opposition parties right when they denounce the PSOE’s betrayal of constitutionalism. The argument has been served up and the next elections are just around the corner, with the regional presidents already in the run-up to the campaign.
Sánchez’s concessions do not harm the socialists equally. In the Valencian Community they already govern with extreme left-wing pro-independence parties and in the case of Navarre even with the support of Bildu, a coalition that includes the political heirs of the terrorist group ETA. But in Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, Asturias, La Rioja and Aragon they have no such dependence.
Page speaks with the authority of having one of the few absolute majorities in autonomous Spain and the fear of asking for a vote from the PSOE to an electorate that thinks the same as he does about the catalan coup plotters. His current hegemony is also based on the success of 2019 in the face of a centre-right that divided its votes among three formations: PP, Ciudadanos and Vox. This time, the concentration that the polls point to in favour of the Popular Party makes it more difficult for him, and any further erosion due to Sánchez’s management threatens his future.
Lambán in Aragón depends, in turn, on a coalition with leftists and regionalists of all stripes who gave him power four years ago, but who are now on the decline. Nor is the PSOE’s electorate in the region at all sympathetic to concessions to the separatists.
Sánchez’s parliamentary spokesman in Congress, Patxi López, acknowledges that the latest payment to ERC, the sedition bill, will have an electoral cost for the PSOE that his boss is counting on. But it is the Page, Lambán and other socialist candidates who will be the first to face the bill.
