“If I were Pedro Sánchez I would be a little angry,” Pere Aragonès warned this Thursday, pointing to Yolanda Díaz, after the lack of understanding with the commons to approve the Catalan public accounts yesterday precipitated the call for early elections in Catalonia for next May 12 and, as a consequence, the President of the Government will renounce his efforts to approve new general budgets of the State for this 2024. And indeed, the irritation with the second vice president of the Executive and leader of Sumar is evident in the Moncloa and in the leadership of the PSOE. “It is very clear that he is not capable of controlling his people,” the socialists lament in reference to Yolanda Díaz.
The gap between the partners of the current coalition of the progressive government, the PSOE and Sumar, thus widens even further, barely one hundred days after its constitution. And it also rains on wet, after the socialists also accused Yolanda Díaz of not having known how to manage her political and even personal clash with Podemos, which further weakened the space on the left of the PSOE with her break with Sumar and her march to the mixed group in the Congress of Deputies.
From Sumar, both Minister Ernest Urtasun and parliamentary spokesperson, Íñigo Errejón, have regretted Sánchez's “unilateral decision” to give up promoting new public accounts for this year, which they have considered “wrong.” But the PSOE spokesperson in Congress, Patxi López, has come out against these criticisms and has defended that it makes no sense to try to promote a new budget project when the new electoral campaign already underway in Catalonia is going to prevent the essential support of the independence groups, Junts and Esquerra, which now only have the objective of fighting for victory with the PSC before the appointment with the polls.
“The elections in Catalonia upset the political map,” Patxi López acknowledged. And he has highlighted that “there are surely going to be political groups that are going to be thinking more about those elections than about approving budgets”, in reference to ERC and Junts. “We all know how this works, therefore, we better not make efforts that lead to melancholy,” stressed the PSOE spokesperson in Congress. From the Moncloa they have justified Sánchez's decision as "an exercise in political realism", and they have already set their objective on the 2025 budgets. Because they have warned that the legislature, in any case, is not at risk. “The legislature is going to last, let no one deduce that this is going to endanger the stability of the Government,” they have settled.
In addition to the veiled reproaches about Yolanda Díaz, however, the socialists also focus on the responsibility of Ada Colau, former mayor of Barcelona and current leader of the commons in the City Council of the Catalan capital, for her refusal to agree on the budgets. with Aragonès without dynamiting, in turn, the pact already sealed with the PSC. “She has been an element of distortion in this entire process,” she says. And they consider that his clash with Yolanda Díaz, after the break with Podemos, increases the crisis in Sumar's space.
The minute and result of this Thursday leaves a rarefied and worn-out atmosphere among the Government partners. The "tweezer" of accusations in which Sumar has been involved, both from the PSOE and from ERC, has greatly unnerved the plurinational group that, without microphones, calls the overacting of one or the other as "excessive" to blame the others. -in this case to the group led by Yolanda Díaz- of “their own evils and errors.”
Already in the corridors of the Lower House, the second vice president and Minister of Labor has assured that she does not share Pedro Sánchez's decision to renounce the new General State Budgets for 2024 and extend the current ones, since in her opinion we must continue working "for the common good" in this country. Díaz, in fact, recalled that both partners were meeting yesterday and negotiating the general accounts when "Moncloa decided not to continue with the budgets." We respect his decision, but evidently we do not share it."
The card of unrest, however, has been played by Sumar's spokesperson and Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, who has stated that "the obligation of a ruler is always to try until the end, no matter how difficult the negotiations may be."
Urtasun, who, however, believes that the legislature is not in danger, "has criticized the PSC's "red line" with the Hard Rock which, in his opinion, has doomed the Catalan budgets to failure. And he has elevated it to category by ensuring that it is precisely the decision that "has dragged" the PSOE to withdraw the Budgets.
