With the candied fruit of the Three Kings roscón that no one ate yet hanging around the kitchens, on Wednesday at 9 in the morning the Cortes will turn on the spotlights of Spanish politics. And they will no longer go out while this complex legislature lasts.
The Congress and, this time also, the Senate are going to become the battlefield in which the duration and fruitfulness of the mandate that emerged from the polls on July 23 will be settled.
The course starts in a hurry. Shortly before the end of last year, the Congress Board – under the control of progressives and nationalists – decided to put their honorable members to work already at the beginning of January.
On the agenda, three Government decree laws, whose approval is not yet guaranteed, the budget stability objectives and, finally, the Amnesty law.
The majority of the investiture plans to have this latest text approved in the Lower House by the end of the month. On January 30th. If nothing goes wrong, with 179 votes in favor and 171 against. No problem.
On the contrary, the three Government decree laws that will be put to the vote on Wednesday do not have approval guaranteed, which would imply the return of the text to the Moncloa palace.
This legislative package ranges from a change to the Criminal Procedure Law, which the pro-independence supporters reject, to unemployment benefit reforms or anti-crisis measures. Even the PP, even with conditions, has offered to support some of these measures.
Overturning any of these decrees would reveal, already in the first plenary session of the political course, the narrow room for maneuver of the Executive in this legislature. Will Junts, ERC, Bildu, PNV or the five Podemos deputies dare to put Sánchez in this trance?
That's what we'll see on Wednesday. Everything suggests that not. But the temptation to highlight the numerical weakness of the Government coalition (146 votes from PSOE and Sumar) is there and some Catalan independence deputies – not all – are firm supporters of making it clear at the first opportunity that they are going it alone.
Junts, with seven deputies, makes the difference in this legislature. Hence the trip of the organization secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, to Barcelona for two days last week revealed by La Vanguardia. Cerdán is going to break the AVE points card record in this term.
But Junts is not the only group that poses problems to the Government. The five Podemos deputies also threaten to ask for the return of the decrees this week.
This situation collides with the determination of the PSOE to keep intact for as long as possible the seal of the bloc of groups that gave the investiture to Pedro Sánchez.
It is true that events such as those of Ferraz last New Year's Eve or the announced intention of the PP to outlaw constitutionally disloyal parties -Junts, ERC, Bildu or PNV, all of them, in some way, are, have been or can be. be according to the interpretation of the PP – it only reinforces the seal of the majority.
The most vocal version of the PP leaves no room to explore any alliance outside the blocs. That is the main guarantee of the Government. But maybe it's not enough.
