"The agreement can and must be achieved, and it will be achieved", said Pedro Sánchez yesterday, and showed "full confidence" that he will achieve the investiture and that Spain will very soon have a new progressive coalition government to face a long four-year legislature that definitively resolves the political conflict in Catalonia, "without fear, with ambition and with audacity".
While the meeting in Brussels between Yolanda Díaz and Carles Puigdemont was revealed, from which the Socialists distanced themselves, the acting Prime Minister opened the course with a conference at the Ateneo de Madrid in which he thanked in advance all the parties "the height of the State that they are demonstrating in their willingness to negotiate and understand with the PSOE and with Sumar". "There are many things that separate the PSOE from these political forces, but there are also many things that unite us", he pointed out. "Plurality, in addition to prosperity, progress and wealth, can mean stability", he predicted. That's what happened during the last legislature. "And now it's time to prove it for another four years", he confided.
The leader of the PSOE already took it for granted that, after the failure of Alberto Núñez Feijóo's investiture, he will achieve his re-election, supported by the same social majority that in the elections of 23-J stopped the "reactionary wave" , to undertake a new stable and lasting legislature. "Progress and coexistence will be the two axes that justify the legislature of the next four years", he assured.
Sánchez assumed, even so, "the difficulty of the challenge we face" to achieve his new investiture. "The task of agreeing and investing a new government will be complex and demanding", he acknowledged, but he did not doubt that he will succeed.
And he already highlighted territorial coexistence in "plural Spain" as a priority of his new mandate. The leader of the PSOE advocated for "leaving behind a past of dialectical trenches and barricades", with the endorsement of the "courageous, risky and sometimes misunderstood measures by Spanish society" that he adopted in the last legislature, such as pardons for the leaders of the process or penal reform.
He thus claimed that these initiatives, which had already obtained the ratification of the ballot boxes, were promoted "with a noble purpose" in order to "continue making progress in the solution of the serious rift that we inherited in Catalonia". And the new legislature will be the occasion to finish the work. "Betting on dialogue and harmony is the best solution to this crisis, a solution that is fully constitutional, that has worked, because Catalonia is infinitely better than it was five years ago."
And without expressly referring to the amnesty demanded by independence, Sánchez announced that "the time has come to be coherent and continue to advance the purpose of coexistence".
"The next legislature must be the one that leaves behind, definitively, the fracture that we experienced in 2017", he proclaimed. Sánchez pointed out that the previous legislature opened a stage of "reunion and harmony" with Catalonia, and that the next four years "will be the ones that consolidate territorial cohesion and guarantee coexistence in democracy".
The leader of the PSOE stressed that "we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past", with reference to the judicialization of the Catalan political conflict that was undertaken by his predecessor, Mariano Rajoy. "It is time for politics, to turn the page, to learn from those mistakes and to look towards a future of coexistence. The time to return to the path that should never have been abandoned. It's time to be consistent and move forward in coexistence", he insisted.
Always without going beyond the constitutional framework, he warned. "Ours is a project that provides seamless support to the democratic Constitution and that unequivocally advocates for a community of free and equal citizens in rights and duties, who agree to live together under the same rules", he defended, in the face of the aspirations of the Catalan and Basque independence. "A common project based on respect, sentiment and affection, which defends the union of all Spaniards and assumes territorial diversity, linguistic and cultural plurality with pride, as part of the strength of our country" , he alleged.
Sánchez emphasized the importance of Spain having a new progressive government "as soon as possible", although he admitted that he cannot guarantee when it will be formed. "It doesn't depend exclusively on me." But he warned: "I will fight with all my strength to make it possible". "I will do it without delay, as soon as this useless waiting time is consumed", he criticized Feijóo, before the "failed investiture" that he predicted for the leader of the PP. An eagerness that he attributed to Feijóo's "obstinacy" to stay at the head of the PP. "Subjecting the country to a sterile time, of paralysis and inaction for purely partisan interests, is not a responsible attitude", he criticized.
