Ángel Collado
Four weeks before the general elections, Pedro Sánchez has once again found in Vox a reason for hope to remain in power. The far-right party has stepped up its demands in negotiations with the PP in all the autonomous regions where it is necessary to complete the PP’s majorities, without Alberto Núñez Feijóo being able to come up with a coherent and comprehensive response to the problem.
The party led by Santiago Abascal is demanding key positions in all regional executives. Its demands are quickly admitted in places like the Valencian Community and flatly rejected in Extremadura at the same time, and with the risk of having to repeat the elections in that community.
On the bewilderment of the centre-right electorate now stand the expectations of the left-wing front in the central government, which will be examined at the ballot box on 23 July.
Sánchez knew that after the defeat of the PSOE, and his own personal defeat, in the May elections, the problem for the winning PP, and Feijóo as its president, was to manage the relationship with Vox. For the moment, the right-wing squabbles of the last week have served to curb his own attrition and draw attention away from his commitments to populist and pro-independence parties, especially Bildu, an organisation that is the heir to the political arm of the terrorist group ETA.
The oxygen ball of the convoluted negotiations between the Popular Party and Abascal’s party has allowed the Sanchistas to return to speculation about their chances of repeating the ‘Frankenstein’ government formula after the next elections. The calculation is that if the PSOE remains in Congress above 100 seats (it had 120), as some polls already suggest, and Sumar, as Podemos’ successor brand, exceeds 30 and is close to Pablo Iglesias’ 35 in 2019, they can still prevent the investiture of Feijóo as head of the Executive.
The Catalan, Basque and Galician separatist parties would have to contribute another thirty or so MPs to prevent an automatic majority for the right. In any case, in the event of a technical tie between the two blocs, in the future lower house it would remain to be seen what Abascal’s demands for the PP’s positions would be and whether Feijóo is willing to accept them.
As the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, repeats, Vox is once again “Pedro Sánchez’s great cushion” because it is always there at the right time to cushion the falls of the president of the Government. This was the case at the beginning of the legislature when Abascal’s deputies abstained on the corresponding decree so that Sánchez could manage European funds to alleviate the economic consequences of the pandemic from his cabinet, without any prior or independent control.
Then came the two motions of censure presented by Vox, which served to show off Sánchez’s parliamentary brilliance, as well as to demonstrate the closing of ranks in his left-wing coalition. In the first, Abascal wanted to dispute the post of head of the opposition with the then president of the PP, Pablo Casado. In the second, with Feijóo absent from the debate because he was not a deputy, the plenary was another self-promotion session used by Sánchez, with the presumed aspirant to the post presented by Abascal, Ramón Tamames, as a touch of colour.
The most famous rift now between the PP and Vox is in Extremadura, where the PP candidate for president of the regional government, María Guardiola, does not want a coalition government with the extreme right. With 38.9 percent of the votes and 28 regional deputies, she is five short of an absolute majority, which is the same as Vox’s five. Abascal’s party, which received less than 8 percent of the vote in the elections, demanded in exchange two ministries in a cabinet now made up of eight members: those of Agriculture plus Culture and Tourism, the key activities in the region.
Guardiola’s “no” to Vox’s demands, which slows down the PP’s campaign and thus eases Sánchez’s campaign, is only a foretaste of what could happen after 23 July in possible negotiations between Feijóo and Abascal in the event that they win an absolute majority.
