Pedro Sánchez closes the year with new budgets and a penal reform already approved by the absolute and transversal majority of the block of the legislature – from ERC and the PDECat to the PNV and EH Bildu – that keeps the Government afloat. With a third package of anti-crisis measures, which will be approved today by the last Council of Ministers of the course, negotiated until the last minute within the coalition Executive between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos, whose body already has deep dents. And with a bitter struggle with the political and judicial right, now for the renewal of the Constitutional Court, which has just broken all the bridges with the leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
In just a few days, a new course begins that, politically, will be monopolized by an intense electoral calendar: the municipal and regional elections next May, and the general elections – the mother of all battles – scheduled for December 2023.
Sánchez himself recounts the total break with Feijóo, just eight months after he assumed the leadership of the main opposition party, as a succession that frustrated opportunities. "We had expectations," they now admit at Moncloa.
The President of the Government held a first meeting with Feijóo on April 7, when the PP had not been in charge for even a week. His predecessor in office, Pablo Casado, warned that he had turned the blockade on the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) into "a personal matter." And they assumed that Feijóo wanted to differentiate himself from Casado's profile, to consolidate the moderate and pactist image that he had managed to convey in his 13 years as president of the Xunta de Galicia -with four consecutive absolute majorities-, precisely with an express agreement to unblock the organ of government of the judges.
Sánchez proposed to seal the judicial pact before June 12, and also presented Feijóo with a document, they recall in Moncloa, "with ten points elaborated specifically to reach an agreement." "Some as simple as the substitution of the term handicapped for disabled in the Constitution," he recalls. An invitation to the pact, therefore, which they understood to be very beneficial for both parties. But that fell on deaf ears. "We never heard anything again," they allege.
Barely six months later, on October 10, Sánchez and Feijóo met again, pressured by the resignation of the president of the CGPJ, Carlos Lesmes, fed up with the blockade. The surprise at Moncloa, as they admit, is that the negotiators for both parties, Félix Bolaños and Esteban González Pons, were called to join the meeting.
"This time it's serious," they interpreted. "We were convinced that Feijóo, now yes, was going to consummate the turn to bury the figure of Casado," they acknowledge. "The deal was done."
But barely two weeks later, the PSOE's negotiation with ERC for the dejudicialization of the political conflict in Catalonia, urged by the vote on the amendments to all the budgets in Congress, got in the way. And Feijóo justified the suspension of the entire negotiation for the repeal of the crime of sedition to benefit the leaders of the process. "His legs trembled and everything blew up," they lamented in Moncloa, referring to the alleged pressure that the hard wing on the right exerted on Feijóo.
That, they say now, was "the turning point." Sánchez accelerated with the criminal reform, the leader of the PP counterattacked by blowing up the processing of the judicial reform in the Senate, through the Constitutional Court, and all the bridges between the two were shattered.
The President of the Government already assumes that he will not be able to renew the CGPJ in the remainder of the legislature -despite the fact that he has already accumulated four years in office-, but insists on trying to unblock the Constitutional through the bill that the PSOE and United We Can They plan to register this week with the support of the entire investiture bloc.
And, at the gates of the new electoral cycle, in Moncloa they admit that there is only room for confrontation with the PP. "The image of moderation with which Feijóo arrived has dissolved, and now he has blended in with Casado and Isabel Díaz Ayuso," they warn.
In his opinion, the video that the PP released last Thursday, on the occasion of the Christmas lottery draw – which indicated that with this government “the seditious, embezzlers and sexual aggressors” already hit the jackpot – certifies this. "After the video, it does not seem that the PP wants to agree or talk about anything with me," Sánchez himself settles.
