To the already convoluted scenario of governing with a parliamentary minority, the coalition Executive faces an added complexity that is not new, but that intensifies with the passing of the legislature: the crossed wars between its own partners. The Government’s reading of some of the latest negotiations carried out before the holidays and the perspective with which they will face challenges this year such as carrying out Budgets is impregnated with a widespread feeling, that each time It is more difficult to agree on the necessary allies. And not so much because of the policies to be agreed upon, but because of the guerrilla war that the majority that supports Pedro Sánchez has become.
Under that prism, some of the political disagreements of recent months are explained in the Executive. There are those in the Government who maintain that a large part of Carles Puigdemont’s “overacting” with his rudeness to Moncloa has only and exclusively to do with his personal battle with Oriol Junqueras and with his party’s political competition with ERC.
One of the most influential people in the Council of Ministers is clear about the diagnosis. “Since they have landed in this real policy of negotiating agreements and approving measures, they have seen themselves with a power that they did not have. And that is good and healthy for democracy and it is a credit to Pedro Sánchez that they have put aside their more pro-independence agenda to focus on other things. But sometimes we have the feeling that when we sit down with both Junts and ERC they are thinking more about their own battle than about what we have to move forward. We already saw it in his day with the investiture and now with other issues. And that is a difficulty, of course,” he maintains.
In the PSOE there are those who are convinced that behind this context Puigdemont’s latest misdeed in December is also explained. “Everything was going well, they were satisfied with the tax reform that we had agreed upon and had recognized that the conversations with them were going well on other issues such as immigration powers. We did not expect that message from Puigdemont at all, but we must not lose sight of the fact that he did it just during the week of the Esquerra congress,” explains a socialist leader.
The battle within the Catalan independence movement has been going on for a long time and in recent months it has been staged openly in Congress by the parliamentary spokespersons of Junts and ERC. It is already recurrent that Gabriel Rufián, the Republican spokesperson, aligns those who were his partners in the process with the right and the extreme right of PP and Vox. And last week he did it with the xenophobic Alliança Catalana formation.
“I listen to the representatives of Junts in Congress justifying the decision to assume powers in immigration matters and I listen to Orriols,” said Rufián in an interview on Cadena Ser, in reference to the leader of the xenophobic group. “Why do you think Junts suddenly remembers this? Because Alliança Catalana eats up a lot of electoral ground,” he noted. Questioned about the hypothesis that Puigdemont’s party ends up making Alberto Núñez Feijóo president, the ERC spokesperson insisted on his thesis. “He has been voting with PP and Vox in Congress for months, they are preparing the ground.”
On the other hand, Junts constantly accuse Esquerra of being a docile partner of Pedro Sánchez incapable of making real commitments in favor of Catalonia. “ERC has no credibility when it threatens to withdraw its support for Pedro Sánchez, they have already lied about the fiscal singularity of Catalonia,” the spokesperson, Míriam Nogueras, reproached them in Congress.
“We are perfectly aware of the cards we have had to play with,” explains another socialist leader who maintains his optimism regarding the General State Budgets. “They negotiate to always score one point over the other. And nothing happens, we have to accept it and we have shown that even in these circumstances we are capable of passing laws,” he concludes.
That, the 2025 accounts, will be the next big political negotiation after the holidays. The President of the Government has ordered all options to move forward with these Budgets with the support of the majority of the investiture to be able to put on track a legislature that has been living on the wire since the election night of July 23. The Executive is fully convinced that the judicial fronts with which the opposition harasses the Government will decline “one after another.”
“We are very calm. Time will put things in their place and if we manage to carry out the Budgets, the opposition will arrive burnt out by 2027,” they say in the Government, where they insist that, whatever happens, the Ministry of Finance plans to keep its word. to present the accounts and negotiate them with the groups.
But the powder keg of the Catalan independence movement is not the only flank that worries the Moncloa, although it is undoubtedly the most complex to manage. The open political war between Podemos and Sumar threatens to become another source of permanent noise and instability. Something that, in fact, some members of the Executive who attend this clash as spectators already reproach the purple ones.
An example is that of the PNV, which has in fact carried out its own cross skirmishes with those of Ione Belarra in public. “What Podemos is doing is absolutely reckless, unless what they want is for elections to be called and their issue is not to improve the lives of citizens but rather to have elections and win their particular duel with Sumar,” said Aitor Esteban. in the halls of Congress after one of the last plenary sessions of the year already has an anti-eviction measure.
After the breakup with Yolanda Díaz and her departure from the parliamentary group, Podemos has already overturned a decree precisely from the Ministry of Labor to reform the unemployment benefit by including a reduction in the IMPREM, the public indicator that determines, for example, the calculation of pensions. And that drive for permanent clash of the purples with Sumar with the electoral future of the left at stake is also present in every Government negotiation.
The tax reform that the Executive launched in December was paradigmatic of all the crusade wars. The PSOE first closed an agreement with its most conservative allies, PNV and Junts. This undermined progressive groups such as Esquerra, EH Bildu or BNG. Taxes on extraordinary profits of large energy companies were excluded from this agreement at the time. The perfect battlefield for all the confrontations between partners to be reproduced.
“It will be other parties who will have to explain that, above the possibility that we all have a minimum of vital dignity, there are the interests of the members of the boards of directors of the large energy companies,” the EH spokesperson said in December. Bildu, Oskar Matute, in reference to the PNV. “It borders on an insult to intelligence that they now present themselves as saviors of the Basque Self-Government who just five days ago voted in favor of a tax that went directly against the waterline of our self-government,” Aitor Esteban responded a few days later.
Without ignoring the puzzle that represents a parliamentary reality incendiary due to the fragility of numbers and the crusading wars, the PSOE are convinced that even today a common interest prevails among all partners to keep the legislature afloat and avoid the alternative of a PP Government with Vox. “We are convinced that nobody wants it and that nobody, furthermore, could explain it,” maintain the socialists, who face the new year with a spirit very similar to that of the previous ones: survive on the wire and carry out negotiations ‘in extremis’ that support the legislature no matter how difficult it may seem.
Source: www.eldiario.es
