Lacking the political capacity to forge majorities, the two major Spanish parties only have the tactics and the short trick to weave a narrative that positions them well in one of the possible future scenarios. The great goal of Alberto Núñez Feijóo is that we remember that he was the winner of the elections, but it is very possible that this victory only serves him to be the leader of the opposition. After being proposed by the King to form a government, he begins a round of contacts whose main purpose is to be able to fill a few minutes of TV news. The numbers don't work for him. Depending on Vox is a bad card in the game that is being played now.
Pedro Sánchez and Núñez Feijóo met this week. As you might expect, it was just a pretext for everyone to reassert their position. The popular has insisted on the mantra of letting the most voted force govern even if it is only for two years. The socialist has emphasized that, given the lack of a majority of the opponent, he is legitimate to try to complete a puzzle that will allow him to be re-elected as president of the Spanish government.
The PP's options to add an absolute majority happen only to get the PNB to make a 180 degree turn in its position, which is very complicated now that the Basque nationalists have to defend a place contested by the independenceists of EH Bildu. All of Feijóo's attempts to become president are therefore a journey that goes nowhere. And once this reality is established, a new act will begin in this play. Once the investiture of the popular leader fails, all the gunpowder will be spent to delegitimize the pact of losers that the socialists will try.
For now, the PP's media mouthpieces have taken a break, waiting for events to unfold, but the political language of the right and far right will flourish again in all its glory when necessary. We will be fed up with hearing that Pedro Sánchez's options to become president involve putting communist, independence, philo-eteran, nationalist, seditious and fugitive-from-justice pacts in the cocktail shaker, and that the price he pays to keep the seat of the Moncloa consists of breaking Spain and submitting to blackmail.
It is difficult to know what is the political price that Pedro Sánchez is willing to pay to get the investiture. Their main negotiating strength is in the political price that would eventually be paid by the parties that, if they did not achieve what they proposed, end up forcing an electoral repeat, and this is where the two Catalan independence parties, Esquerra and Junts, will have to sharpen their skills the pencil to maximize bargaining power.
Pedro Sánchez has already shown signs on more than one occasion of traveling down paths that most analysts would dismiss. No one, or almost no one, would have believed, when the previous legislature began in 2019, that he would be willing to pay the political price of pardons and the repeal of the crime of sedition in the Penal Code, but he did. And it is clear that he did it out of sheer necessity for political survival, however much, once the decision was made, he wanted to turn necessity into a virtue and present as desirable something that, if he could have avoided it, he would never have done.
Now, the bar that the Catalan pro-independence parties point to is that of amnesty and that of the referendum. Both are political concepts that require legal translation for them to take shape. We will see what comes of the negotiation, but we must never forget that what is legislated by the Spanish Courts always ends up at the table of the Constitutional Court, which has become a kind of third chamber where great political consensus can be forged, as pass, for example, with the Statute of Catalonia of 2006, and leave everything on wet paper. Perhaps this is why we should also consider amending the TC law so that it cannot interfere in political agreements that arise from parliamentary majorities.
Esquerra and Junts add up to 14 deputies, all absolutely decisive, who, playing their cards right, can achieve important successes in the political, economic and social agenda of Catalonia during the four years of the legislature that could now begin. We hope that the country's strategy prevails over partisan tactics and that the opportunity given by arithmetic is not wasted.
