“Today we get down to work,” the Moncloa and the PSOE leadership warned yesterday, after Pedro Sánchez accepted the day before Felipe VI's commission to try to articulate a parliamentary majority that would support his inauguration as President of the Government. And with the intention, furthermore, that this same majority in Congress guarantees stability for the entire legislature to a new progressive coalition Executive. Firstly, with the general State budgets for next year.
Sánchez himself got to work immediately, with two relevant quotes. With the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, in the morning, to begin to get that future government coalition on track. And with the first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, in the afternoon, to stage a common front in the face of the complex negotiation with the Catalan independence movement, essential for the success of the investiture and the viability of the legislature.
For all issues related to Catalonia, and therefore to achieve agreements with both Esquerra and Junts, the leader of the PSOE “will be in permanent coordination” with the first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, as announced yesterday by the spokesperson for the executive de Ferraz, Minister Pilar Alegría.
Sánchez and Illa, to showcase this strengthened alliance, met in the afternoon at the PSOE headquarters in Madrid, and contacts between the two "will continue permanently over the coming weeks."
It is not the first time that Sánchez has turned to Illa to try to successfully complete negotiations in the always complex Catalan political scenario, now aggravated by the fight between ERC and Junts to make profitable an eventual investiture of the leader of the PSOE before their respective electorates and everything. the independence sphere. The winner of the last Catalan elections, and current head of the opposition in the Parliament, was already part, along with Adriana Lastra and José Luis Ábalos, of the negotiating team appointed by Sánchez for talks with ERC before the previous investiture of the leader of the PSOE . The Republicans' abstention on that occasion allowed Sánchez to be inaugurated in January 2020.
Now, Sánchez is not only seeking the favorable vote of ERC, but also of Junts, to successfully crown the King's commission, so everything indicates that the endeavor will be even more difficult.
The prominence that Sánchez gives to Illa, in the face of the new negotiations, is also a clear message for Junts and ERC. Faced with the bilateral dialogue tables demanded by the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, the leader of the PSC demands that a broad dialogue be also articulated between all the Catalan political forces, to confront the political conflict in Catalonia.
The PSOE, for now, demands from Junts the same “generosity” that Sánchez offers, in implicit reference to an amnesty for those prosecuted by the process, and to the renunciation of unilaterality by the party led by Carles Puigdemont. “Generosity is that all political forces do their part, and that they are aware that we have to advance economically, socially, in coexistence, in rights and in equality,” said the acting Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolanos. “Generosity means that we are all aware that we have to do our part to close wounds and open a new stage,” Bolaños remarked.
