We know that Pedro Sanchez He always operates at the limit, at the very moment when he seems to be on the brink of the abyss. This time, the President of the Government has done like the child who takes his ball when he sees he is going to lose and manages to have to start another match a few days later in which he can win and, in any case, avoids the bad taste of defeat, according to the metaphor used by a Moncloa official.
The government was on the ropes and had lost Thursday’s vote on the spending ceiling in Congress, which would mean a hard political and parliamentary defeat. But two days earlier, it had withdrawn its proposal, identical to the one it had presented in July and which PP, Vox and Junts had rejected. Another of its unexpected twists on the wire.
Today, Sánchez is preparing to enter into negotiations with his pro-independence partners to present a new text to the House. The goal is to survive in the face of adversity and there is practice in this area. In any case, if he fails to convince Junts, the government will be able to approve a budget project, with the same spending ceiling for 2023, and with few options to move forward, but a harsh political and parliamentary defeat will have been avoided in the extreme. I mean, a good decision in any case.
And what if, after so much speculation about extensions, early elections and Sánchez himself admitting that it is possible to govern without budgets, it turns out that he manages to reach a new pact in extremis and advance the accounts and the legislative?
This time, Moncloa sees options for success in its recovery, as it first accepts the Junts’ request to start from scratch and rectify the proposal. The party’s claim Carles Puigdemont is that there are more resources for the communities – starting with Catalonia – and the unblocking of commitments made with Junts which were getting bogged down.
Puigdemont himself transferred the socialist leader on Friday Santos Cerdan the memorial of accumulated grievances. It is essentially about the transfer of immigration powers to Catalonia, new investments, the execution of others already closed, a system of consultation for this community outside the common model, the promotion of the use of Catalan in the European Union, research commissions engaged with the Congress and even the immediate application of the amnesty.
The government has set to work and now sees a loophole that would allow it to strike a backroom deal and impose a new spending cap for pave the way for the 2025 State General Budget. That would end the legislature at least until 2027. The skies opened again for Sánchez when a devastating cyclone threatened him most.
Negotiation
Moncloa sources assure that they will now open intense negotiations on all fronts with Junts and announce in the coming weeks news on the progress made on the pending issues arising from previous agreements with this formation.
For example, just yesterday, andThe Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jose Manuel Albareshe further asked in a letter to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsolathat allow the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European ParliamentThis is Albares’ third letter on this subject and it coincides with the decision to promote blocked commitments.
And the socialists corrected it two congressional inquiry committees that they agreed with the investiture and that they remained standing: one on the 2017 jihadist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils and another on Operation Catalonia (allegedly illegal police activity against the independence movement).
The first concession in the negotiation is the rectification of Sánchez himself, who renounces approving the same spending ceiling rejected, because after having assured that he would not rectify it, he now withdraws it to prepare a new one. To the point that some within the government wonder how it is possible that this was not done before, that is, that it was negotiated before returning to Congress.
“Now these are numbers and not principles and, therefore, there are already options to negotiate,” the government explains about the new position of Junts. For the moment, Junts has publicly made the specific request that the Autonomous Communities have a third of the deficit target and that the vice-president Maria Jesus Montero He considers this option impossible. But it is remembered that Montero had said that it was impossible to assume the agreement and that Sánchez considered the amnesty unconstitutional.
However, the two circumstances that most worry Puigdemont remain pending: the delay in the application of the amnesty law and the presence of Salvador Illa at the head of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
First of all, the government is leaving the deadlines for approving budgets pending, even though the Constitution clearly establishes that executives They must send the draft accounts to Parliament before the end of September.
It is now possible that this shipment will be delayed until November, after the Congress of Junts, which, according to the government, can facilitate the approval of the accounts. This is important for Moncloa and, in fact, Cerdán and the other government interlocutors have offered this possibility to Puigdemont and his team in Geneva.
If an agreement is reached, the government will present it to the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council, where it will have the majority, and then must approve it in the Council of Ministers for processing in Congress.
Meanwhile, the government is once again launching the political illusion of accusing the PP of having blocked the deficit trajectory. The spokesperson herself, Pilar Alegriaand other ministers attacked the party of Alberto Nuñez Feijoo for rejecting the agreement.
The government did not negotiate with the PP, it did so with all its partners, including Junts, in exchange for compensation and asked the main opposition party to get it out of the political quagmire when it realized it had no support.
