A long day of intense last-minute negotiations between the PSOE and Sumar was scheduled to culminate last night with a meeting between Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz to settle the pending issues and definitively seal the programmatic agreement that supports a new progressive coalition government between the two. formations, if the socialist leader achieves his investiture.
The forecast is that Sánchez and Díaz will stage the pact this morning, signing the agreement in public, with lights and stenographers.
The negotiating teams of the PSOE and Sumar, headed by María Jesús Montero and Nacho Álvarez, accelerated the conversations by videoconference throughout yesterday, with a view to being able to seal the agreement at the highest level, between Sánchez and Díaz.
The socialists went all out to try to reach a consensus on the programmatic pact. “It will go quickly, very quickly,” they encouraged in the morning in the leadership of the PSOE, and they saw the agreement “imminent.” “The accelerator is pressed,” they warned. At night, with the negotiation still in progress, they assumed that there would be an agreement, although in any case it will not be made official until today.
The calendar for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez is beginning to tighten, with November 27 as the deadline to avoid a repeat of the general elections, and in the leadership of the PSOE they stepped on the accelerator to begin to close some of the open folders in the negotiations that maintain multiple parties with the parliamentary groups to articulate a new investiture and legislative majority.
Firstly, with Sumar, the formation led by Yolanda Díaz, to be able to form a new progressive coalition government if there is an investiture, while negotiations continue, specifically, with Junts, Esquerra and the PNV. All votes are necessary for there to be investiture and the new legislature to take flight.
The urgency of the PSOE was also determined by Sánchez's intense agenda, now very focused on the crisis in the Middle East. The acting President of the Government will travel to Brussels tomorrow to participate in the Tripartite Social Summit, and will also be in the community capital on Thursday and Friday, for the European Council meeting.
So the PSOE's intention was to close the agreement with Sumar last night, so that today it will be staged with a new meeting between Sánchez and Díaz, before or after the meeting of the Council of Ministers, to make the programmatic agreement official.
From there, the PSOE could convene its federal committee for next Saturday, to activate the consultation process with the socialist militancy on a government pact, as mandated by its statutes.
Sánchez and Díaz themselves were the first to meet, on October 4, after the leader of the PSOE accepted the commission from King Felipe VI, the day before, to try to assemble a parliamentary majority to support his re-election as President of the Government. At that meeting, both gave each other a month to try to seal a programmatic agreement. María Jesús Montero and Nacho Álvarez rolled up their sleeves and since then intensified the negotiations between the PSOE and Sumar.
Yolanda Díaz's party, however, did not want to share such an optimistic assessment of the situation as the PSOE did in the last hours. Although Ernest Urtasun, spokesperson for the organization, still hoped to seal the agreement within the expected time frame, this week, yesterday morning he warned that “fundamental” issues for Sumar were still not closed, such as the reduction of working hours, the reform of dismissal, the taxation of banks and large energy companies, or the deployment and advancement of the Housing law, with the creation of the price observatory and the regulation of vacation rentals in urban centers, which was outside the current norm Urtasun explained.
The economic vice president, Nadia Calviño, in turn opted to transfer the debate on the reduction of working hours to the scope of collective bargaining. And, in any case, Podemos spokesperson Pablo Fernández evaluated the content of the agreement being negotiated between the PSOE and Sumar as “clearly insufficient,” demanding that the program be “much more ambitious.”
