FROM OUR REPORTER
MADRID — The hunt for alliances has begun in Spain after the general election that has resulted in a virtual political impasse. Socialist Pedro Sánchez, who won 122 seats, two more than in 2019, is aiming for a fresh start in his current coalition government. “This democracy will find the formula for governance,” he said at the PSOE board meeting.
For his part, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, president of the People’s Party, which won the election by votes and seats (136), admitted that he “did not meet all our expectations” but reiterated his right to form the new executive board and said he had already contacted all party leaders with whom he could form an alliance. There are four: Vox (33 seats), Union del pueblo navarro (1), Coalicion Canaria (1) and the Basque Nationalist Party (5, currently allied with the PSOE and apparently not very available).
“We agreed to continue the conversation throughout the week,” Feijóo said. However, the positions of Vox and Pnv seem to be irreconcilable, as the secretary of the far-right party affirmed: “The hand extends to the PP,” declared Ignacio Garriga, but “the patriot voice” will never join that of the Basque nationalists.
In short, both leaders of Spain’s two major parties are not giving up, but the “formula of governability” will not be easy or quick to conquer. You have until mid-August: the new parliament will take office on the 17th, after which King Felipe VI. start the consultation round. The constitution does not oblige the sovereign to appoint the president of the party with the most votes, but this has always been the case in post-Franco democracy: it wasn’t until 2016 that the popular Mariano Rajoy gave up, despite knowing he didn’t have the numbers. Feijóo still believes in it. The magic number is 176, the seats required for an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies. However, as recent history shows, one can also be satisfied with the external support of some of them. The alternative is to go back to the polls around Christmas or early January.
Newspapers and television treat themselves to the sums. In all scenarios, the nationalist parties are crucial, including those that emerged from the elections with broken bones. This is the case in Catalonia, where the Socialist Party (PSC) achieved an excellent result (19 seats), to the detriment of the Esquerra Republicana (Ercs) and the Junts per Catalunya, which only managed 7 seats each. The situation is more stable in the Basque Country, where Bildu (6 seats) stole an MP (5) from the PNV.
The PSOE bloc has a better chance of achieving its goal by adding the seats of Sumar (31), the party on its left led by Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Diaz, to those of its regional allies, who have already declared their willingness to negotiate, despite some differences and various demands on the negotiating table. Crucial, however, remains the external support of Junts, the party of Carles Puigdemont, the former governor of Catalonia, the instigator of the “separatist process” that ended in a wave of arrests and his flight to Brussels.
“We will not trade our vote for anything,” junts leaders warned. They demand amnesty and self-determination. That means a new separatist referendum. The request was inadmissible, with former PSOE leader José Luis Zapatero, who is very close to Sánchez, immediately responding: “We will not discuss the indisputable.” The hot potato landed in the hands of Yolanda Diaz, who had already instructed the former Podemos spokeswoman who had aligned himself with Sumar to fly to Belgium to negotiate with Puigdemont.
To further complicate the picture, Spanish prosecutors have asked for a new international arrest warrant to be issued against the former Catalan governor, who no longer enjoys the immunity of the European Parliament and is charged with crimes of disobedience and embezzlement (the reform of the penal code has abolished the crime of sedition).