This week, the strategy of the outgoing president of the government, the socialist Pedro Sanchezduring the failed investiture sessions of the Popular Party (PP) candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóopowerfully caught the attention of Spanish citizens, more than the process itself to elect a leader.
Again, Sánchez showed off his political brilliance to achieve his aspiration to continue in the Moncloa Palace: chose not to speak.
While the candidate with the most votes in the last presidential elections, the conservative Núñez Feijóo, did not achieve a sufficient majority in the Congress of Deputies to become the new president of the country, Sánchez delegated the spokesperson to Óscar Puente, former socialist mayor of Valladolid and known for his sharp oratory.
“The deputies could have shown their positions and deployed their arguments, but the ruling Socialist Party chose the fight”says analyst José Andrés Rojo.
And Óscar Puente, in effect, put the conservative candidate on the ropes and turned him into a punching bag. After a first setback on Wednesday, Feijóo lost a second vote on Friday in which a simple majority would have also won him.
With 172 favorable votes out of 350 – those of the PP, the right-wing Vox and two small parties – his candidacy was rejected by another 177 deputies from the Socialist Party, the left and regionalist formations. One vote even had to be counted as null since a deputy who was not going to support Feijóo voted by mistake in his favor.
With his rival defeated, Sánchez should soon receive the order from King Felipe VI to try it. Before that, the monarch will hold another round of consultations with representatives of the political parties on Monday and Tuesday, as announced by the Royal Family on Friday.
The investiture debate before Congress will probably be held between mid-October and November, given that the deadline for voting in Congress is November 27.
And, in the event that the socialist fails to articulate a majority before that date, general elections will be automatically called for mid-January.
path of thorns
Pedro Sánchez has a titanic task ahead of him, because to achieve the majorities that will allow him to continue governing, he will have to obtain the support of the Catalan independentists, who do not stop increasing their demands. Starting with an amnesty.
Puente, transmitting his boss’s message, declared this week that it was necessary to “give a way out to those who have placed themselves on the margins of legality so that they can return to politics,” in clear allusion to the possibility that Sánchez would grant an amnesty. to the Catalan separatists who intervened in the referendum held in 2017, which sought separation from Spain.
According to analyst Daniel Gascón: “The attitude of the acting president is disconcerting: the champion of dialogue and harmony who does not deign to speak with the leader of the other major party in his country. This nonsense, which some hail as ‘brilliant tactical maneuver’, not only violates parliamentary courtesy, but also makes a mockery of procedures.”
And it was surprising that the word amnesty was not mentioned by the socialists in the debate.
Strategically, during the debate, the acting president left it in the hands of Sumar, the group that is part of the Government coalition, to add fuel to the fire.
His justice spokesman, Enrique Santiago – known in Colombia for having participated in the peace talks with the FARC – recalled that, under the presidency of the PP conservative José María Aznar, 1,443 pardons were granted in a single day and he also granted that measure of grace to 15 members of the Catalan independence armed group Terra Lliure.
However, the possible support of the Catalan separatists for Sánchez is still not clear.
These last days, Junts and Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), the other major pro-independence party, raised the bar even further and demanded that negotiations be opened to hold a self-determination referendum.
Gabriel Rufián, spokesperson for ERC, specified that, without a self-determination referendum, “the amnesty will be worth little.” In response, the coalition government released a statement stating that it will never negotiate a self-determination referendum for Catalonia.
“Dialogue must serve to overcome the division and not to deepen the rupture and discord that generated so much tension in a sterile way in Catalonia and the rest of Spain,” they announced.
In power for five years, Sánchez once again showed his confidence that he will be able to form a majority. Spain “is preparing to repeat this progressive coalition government in a short time,” he said Thursday in Madrid in front of European socialists. But despite his optimism, the negotiations appear to be increasingly delicate. With the support of the most radical left, with whom he has governed since 2020, and the Basque separatists, Sánchez needs the indispensable votes of Carles Puigdemont’s Catalan independence party, Junts per Catalunya, which systematically opposed his government.
At the beginning of September, the leader of the 2017 secession attempt demanded from Belgium, where he settled to escape Spanish justice, an amnesty for separatists with legal cases for their participation in the failed independence, in exchange for the support of his training. What there is no doubt about is that Sánchez has shown that he always gets his way. “He has more lives than a cat,” one hears people say among Spaniards.
The president has demonstrated on several occasions that he is a great political strategist, with an enormous capacity for resistance: he was accused of plagiarizing his doctoral thesis and he showed that this was not the case. In 2015 he was a socialist candidate in the presidential elections, he obtained the worst result of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (Psoe) throughout democratic history, and after a second attempt, he lost again.
Under pressure, he resigned from his position as general secretary of his party. Left for dead politically, he announced that he would dedicate himself to touring Spain in his car to seek support from the base of his party. In 2017 he ran for the Psoe Congress to be general secretary again and was defeated.
Sánchez did not slow down. He continued in the fight, resisting. The following year he presented a motion of censure in Congress against the conservative president Mariano Rajoy for corruption scandals involving figures from the PP. The motion went ahead and, later, after intense and repeated general elections, in November 2019 and with support from the left of Unidas Podemos, despite the fact that he had expressed that he would not count on it, he managed to put together the coalition, finally reaching the presidency.
According to The Guardian columnist Eoghan Gilmartin, Pedro Sánchez is “a brilliant strategist capable of bold political maneuvers.” Thanks to him, he says, “the Psoe has remained relatively stable, even when Spanish politics has been in constant change and crisis.”
Núñez Feijóo refused to abstain so that Sánchez could govern without the votes of the Catalan independence movement and demanded that Spain go to a repeat election rather than approve an amnesty. This being the case, the path seems complicated for Sánchez, when King Felipe VI entrusts him, as is foreseeable, with the formation of a government.
And although Sánchez aspires to repeat the progressive coalition government that currently exists in Spain, the 121 seats of his party and the 31 of the Izquierda Sumar group that supports him are not enough, so he needs an agreement with the Basque and Catalan nationalists and independence supporters, something that certainly seems impossible.
JUANITA SAMPER OSPINA
TIME CORRESPONDENT
MADRID
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