The socialists definitively closed at dawn this Friday the support that guarantees the investiture of Pedro Sánchez as president of the Government. After resolving the agreement with Junts in Brussels, the PSOE gave a final push to its negotiations with the PNV, which ended after midnight, and which, together with the support of the Canarian Coalition, ensured the acting president the support of 179 of the 350 deputies of Congress, all except those on the right. PP, Vox and Unión del Pueblo Navarro will be left alone against Sánchez’s candidacy with 171 negative votes. Sánchez has increased the perimeter of his support with the Canarian Coalition, whose executive has finally joined the formations that will provide the yes to the socialist leader. The investiture session will be next week.
Sánchez and the president of the PNV, Andoni Ortuzar, solemnized their pact this Friday morning in the Congress of Deputies. The Basque leader then detailed the agreements before the press, very satisfied with the results obtained. The PSOE undertakes to apply within two years a very old demand of the PNV: the transfer of all the powers provided for in the Statute of Gernika and which have never been achieved in four decades. There are thirty of them and among them is a very prominent one: the economic regime of Social Security, an issue that the responsible minister, José Luis Escrivá, had resisted during the last legislature. The Government also agrees that in the Basque Country regional labor agreements have primacy over state ones, something it opposed two years ago and which caused the PNV to reject the labor reform.
Faced with the confidence with which Ortuzar explained the agreements, the PSOE did not take long to cool the scope of what was agreed on the economic regime of Social Security. The issue is not among the transfers that will take place in three months, stressed the acting Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, and even in a period of more than two years “it will be difficult” for it to be carried out. The deputy general secretary of the PSOE also emphasized that her party and the PP itself have agreed on this issue with the Basque party several times without it ever coming to fruition.
The socialists have agreed to open another negotiating process on the nationalist claim to go beyond the current Statute. There the PNV will propose formulas that allow “the national recognition of Euskadi” and the establishment of a “bilateral relationship” with the State. The nationalists maintain that this is possible within the framework of the Constitution, since it recognizes in its transitional provisions the “historical rights” of the Basque Country. This objective would imply the elaboration of a new Statute endorsed by the majority of the Parliament of Vitoria, as Ortuzar explained. For this process, both parties have also given themselves a period of two years.
“In times like this of maximum complexity and political uncertainty,” said the PNV leader, “all political forces must act with maximum responsibility and high-mindedness.” The Basque leader, who negotiated the agreement with his spokesperson in Congress, Aitor Esteban, highlighted that the PSOE has gone further in its guarantees than in the pact signed four years ago by both forces to facilitate Sánchez’s previous investiture. Then, Ortuzar explained, the PSOE promised to “study” the nationalist demands. This time, according to him, a semantic nuance has been introduced to go up a notch in the commitments, since the PSOE not only talks about “studying”, but about “negotiating”. In the final stretch of the last legislature, the PNV often complained that the Sánchez Government failed to comply with some of the agreed issues.
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The purpose of the PNV is that the understanding with the future Executive extends throughout the legislature, as long as the socialists maintain their commitments. “I trust President Sánchez’s word, but our commitment is linked to loyal compliance with the agreements,” said Ortuzar. The Peneuvista leader admitted the complex panorama that the legislature presents given the heterogeneity of what is presumed to be the parliamentary base of the future Government and because “all the votes are going to be needed all the time.” He illustrated it with a very Basque metaphor: “We are all in the same trawler and we have to try not to let the blades collide.” Even so, he guaranteed that the PNV will be “through thick and thin,” even to take “unpopular measures” that, according to him, may be necessary.
Ortuzar made very clear the abyss that has opened between his party and the PP in the face of the popular movement’s approach to Vox. The demonstrations these days against the future amnesty law have seemed “horror” to him. “I thought that Francoist nostalgia had disappeared,” he stated in an alarmed tone. And he took the opportunity to highlight that the reactions of the popular people in recent weeks do nothing more than “reaffirm” the decision that his party made the day after the 23-J elections not to negotiate anything with the PP as long as this party maintains agreements with Vox, whose political attitude he described as “clearly undemocratic.”
The socialists have reached 179 supports for the investiture when the Canarian Coalition also joined with a series of commitments and investments of the so-called Canarian agenda, which are the same ones that this formation signed on August 22 with the PP for the failed investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. The yes of the Canary Islands representative Cristina Valido is a single vote but with symbolic relevance for Sánchez, since her postulates are very far from the independence movement. In fact, CC agreed on the islands with the PP to evict the PSOE from the autonomous Government, voted in favor of the failed investiture of Feijóo and is against the amnesty for those prosecuted by the processes Catalan.
After signing the agreement with María Jesús Montero, both Congresswoman Valido and the CC Organization Secretary, David Toledo, appeared to highlight that they had “signed with their heads more than with their hearts” and above all thinking about obtaining from the Government “inevitable ” by Sánchez a series of commitments, investments and infrastructure works for the Canary Islands in the next General State Budgets. They quantified these commitments at around 1,000 million euros when the forecast in the previous accounts had remained at 800. Some of these items, however, were already established in previous agreements. The two leaders stressed that they have chosen to join the bloc for “the entire legislature” of Pedro Sánchez when they saw that his investiture was going to prosper and so as not to distance themselves from possible benefits agreed with the central Government. They focused on the migratory crisis, the reconstruction of the island of La Palma after the volcano, the water crisis in La Graciosa and other measures.
Toledo maintained that the current migratory crisis is more important for the Canary Islands and more of a State than the amnesty law for the Catalan independence parties. CC, in any case, confirmed to the PSOE negotiators that he will not support the pardon measures, one of his greatest obstacles in this negotiation due to the internal misgivings it arouses in the party itself. CC stressed that in the pact there are many promises that have already been signed with the PP, but he specified as the most relevant that the Government will reform the Minors’ Law to impose the obligation that administrations have to take care of the immigrant minors assigned to them. even if they do not reach their territory.
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