After supporting Salvador Illa this Sunday at the PSC congress held in Barcelona, Pedro Sánchez met with the federal executive of the PSOE this Monday, at its headquarters on Ferraz Street in Madrid. And, according to sources present at the meeting, the President of the Government has been “very optimistic” regarding the imminent electoral calendar, which begins on April 21 with the appointment with the polls in Euskadi, continues on May 12 in Catalonia and It will culminate on June 9 with the elections to the European Parliament. The Basque and Catalan elections are an opportunity for the socialists to make up for the electoral setback suffered in Galicia on February 18, where the Popular Party managed to revalidate its absolute majority. And they could also boost the meager expectations of the PSOE before the European elections, in a context of the rise of the right across the continent.
“The upcoming elections in Catalonia and Euskadi are going to make the irrelevance of the Popular Party in both communities crystal clear,” celebrated the spokesperson for the PSOE executive, Esther Peña. “You are of no use to the citizens when your ultramontane positions lead you to political irrelevance,” the socialist leader has criticized the formation of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whom she has considered incapable of understanding the political plurality and territorial diversity of Spain.
The socialists aspire to revalidate their current government coalition with the PNV in Euskadi, while in Catalonia they trust that Salvador Illa will not only come first again in the elections, but that on this occasion he will manage to govern. “We expect a magnificent result,” Peña pointed out about the PSC's expectations in the Catalan elections. And he has highlighted that, on the other hand, the PP today has single-digit percentages of votes in Euskadi, Catalonia or Navarra.
The leadership of the PSOE continues to focus its political complaint on the case of alleged corruption that affects the partner of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, of whom it once again demands her immediate resignation, while at the same time celebrated that this Monday the Conflict of Interest Office has filed the PP complaint against Pedro Sánchez's wife, Begoña Gómez. “We already said that it had no basis,” Peña warned.
Ferraz's spokesperson has assured that, despite the intensity of electoral events in the next three months, the legislative activity of the Government and the PSOE will not be paralyzed, despite the fact that Sánchez has renounced new general State budgets for this 2024 due to the electoral advance in Catalonia, not being able to count on the essential support for them from ERC and Junts, formations already focused on the appointment with the polls. “I have another bad news for the PP: the legislature will be long,” Peña warned. “The Government continues to approve and send legislation to Congress,” she stressed. The latest initiatives, he recalled, are the Amnesty law, which is now being processed in the Senate, or the Artistic Education law. This same Tuesday, the socialist group plans to register the bill already committed by Sánchez to abolish prostitution in Spain.
“This legislature is going to be long, we are going to continue legislating and talking to all groups, as we have done until now,” Peña insisted. “We have shown that we are the only party with a vocation for government capable of reaching out and sitting down to talk and agree. And we will continue to do so, regardless of the results of the Basques, the Catalans and the Europeans,” he assured.
In this sense, he has framed the last meeting held in Switzerland between the PSOE and Junts Per Catalunya as political normality, the fourth already, just after the approval in Congress of the Amnesty law. But Peña has stressed that the next stage in this negotiation will not be a self-determination referendum in Catalonia, as Junts and Esquerra predict. “Of course there is no negotiation on any referendum,” he stressed. “The PSOE will never accept an illegal referendum, which would only divide Catalan society. It's not on our agenda. It is not in our planning,” Ferraz's spokesperson concluded. But she has recognized that they cannot expect the Catalan independentists to give up their top positions either.
