When next July 23 marks one year since the general elections, the legislature will barely have begun to move. This is assumed by both the Government and all of its parliamentary partners, resigned to a very low intensity legislative production due to the ‘super electoral spring’ that will link the Basque, Catalan and European campaigns. A high-voltage political calendar that has even led Pedro Sánchez to throw in the towel with the General State Budgets.
“It is news that alters the political board, the sensible thing is to work on the 2025 Budgets,” acknowledged María Jesús Montero after the electoral advance of Catalonia. The assumption that, until further notice, Sánchez’s Executive will go ahead with the extended accounts, contains a political diagnosis that transcends the budgetary: that the very complex and weak parliamentary majority on which the Government is based barely allows it, really, govern.
The result that came out of the polls on June 23 already hinted at a turbulent scenario for this governability. That night, and despite its own expectations, the PP crashed against the arithmetic evidence of its inability to secure a majority in Congress due to its dependence on the extreme right, even though it was the political force with the most votes. However, Alberto Núñez Feijóo decided to display the ceremony of a failed investiture.
On that road to nowhere, which had such notable stops as proposing to Pedro Sánchez to govern for two years each after exploring the possibilities of an agreement with Carles Puigdemont behind Vox’s back, the first two months of the legislature passed. It was not until September 29 when the majority of the Lower House definitively overthrew the PP leader’s performance. And it gave way to the real negotiation between the PSOE and the Catalan independence forces to invest Pedro Sánchez as president in exchange for an amnesty law.
Corruption sets the agenda
But there would still be another two months of tug-of-war between the PSOE, Junts and ERC, with the maneuvers of Judge García Castellón in the background, so that Sánchez could revalidate his permanence in Moncloa. On November 16, the majority of Congress re-elected him president, although the mandate that began from then on began a journey in fits and starts.
The parliamentary processing of the amnesty law itself pitted the Catalan independence partners against each other and also caused a clash between the PSOE itself and Junts. A circumstance that jeopardized even the approval of basic economic packages for the Executive that were on the verge of being overturned.
With the processing of the amnesty stalled and with the Executive tied hand and foot to carry out major reforms in Congress, the first electoral event of the year arrived. The Galician elections of February 18 once again represented a parenthesis in national politics that ended with another autonomous disaster of the left in favor of the absolute majority of the PP.
Without time to digest the consequences of that electoral hangover, corruption once again marked the political agenda after many years. The ‘Koldo case’ broke out as the first scandal of the Pedro Sánchez Government and claimed the career of José Luis Ábalos, the former Minister of Transport and Secretary of Organization of the PSOE who was expelled from the party and exiled to the Mixed Group.
This scandal was followed by another: that of the tax crimes recognized by the partner of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and revealed by elDiario.es. And parliamentary activity then became a battlefield in which the crossfire between the Government and the opposition became almost the only item on the agenda.
The unlocking of the amnesty
In between, the PSOE, Junts and ERC finally managed to unblock the amnesty law. They did so after a very complex negotiation in which all parties concluded that the green light for the grace measure should lead to a moderately stable legislature. What was agreed, in fact, was that the processing of the amnesty would be followed by the approval of the General State Budgets. But then everything blew up again.
The lack of agreement between the Catalan progressive forces for the approval of the Generalitat’s accounts led Pere Aragonès to precipitate an abrupt end to the legislature in the Parliament and call elections for May 12. And now, embedded between those of Euskadi and those of the European Parliament, the Catalan elections definitively leave the legislature up in the air.
With the announcement that Carles Puigdemont will be the Junts candidate to preside over the Generalitat, all the unknowns about the viability of the legislature for Pedro Sánchez remain intact. Not even the approval and entry into force of the amnesty law guarantees a minimally clear political horizon, given that the formation of the next Catalan Government could once again alter the balance of forces in Congress. The socialists do not hide that, despite the good expectations of the PSC and Salvador Illa for May 12, the doubt about whether or not those of Puigdemont will be able to be part of the next Government and what influence that will later have on its seven deputies in Madrid keeps the Executive in suspense.
Pedro Sánchez, meanwhile, maintains his stability speech in public. “They will have to wait four years, it will be very long. I understand it but that’s how it is,” he said upon his arrival in Brussels to participate in the European summit. In the last control session, and in the face of reproaches from some parliamentary partners for the drift of the legislature, the president replied: “We have extended expansive budgets, but this Government is being active. “We have raised the SMI by 5%, we have revalued pensions, we have increased the Minimum Living Income, we have extended many of the measures to protect ourselves from the conflict in Ukraine…” he defended.
During the first term of the coalition government between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos, the president showed off having been able to provide institutional stability to the country with a four-year term, budgets “approved in a timely manner” and having approved “two hundred laws”. ” to give his mandate an eminently reformist character. Now, all ambition in Moncloa is reduced to ensuring that, after the marathon of elections, the Executive can remain standing.
Source: www.eldiario.es
