The faces said it all: a feast of laughter, kisses and hugs on the government bench, before a funeral of sad faces on the PP bench. They were tense days and the sitting Executive’s joy was ebullient at last Thursday’s inaugural session of Congress. Nothing mattered to them. The left managed to get the Catalan pro-independence movement to back a table it controlled, headed by socialist Francina Armengol, while the right was divided. The day has shown something that was not so clear until a few hours earlier: that Pedro Sánchez has the possibility of re-appointing his mandate. Now the hardest part begins. The president, who risked pardoning the trial leaders or reforming the penal code, faces an even more complex demand: a legal solution to put the trial on hold and prevent further imprisonment of independents. This is what Junts and ERC simply call amnesty.
Six years later, most of the Procés’ main leaders were convicted and served four years in prison until Sánchez pardoned them. Others, like Carles Puigdemont, former President and Chair of the Junts, and Marta Rovira, still General Secretary of the ERC, are still on the run outside the country. And dozens more are awaiting trial.
The sedition and embezzlement reform that the administration enacted in late 2022 with a large majority in Congress to solve the problem of these second layers did not work as expected. The Supreme Court did not consider this to be valid for the trial and maintained, for example, the charge of serious embezzlement against Puigdemont, but withdrew the charge of incitement to hatred. Dozens of independents face stiff penalties and significant real estate costs. And here lies the core of the coming negotiations.
Thursday’s session made it very clear that there are only two options: either Sánchez reaches an agreement and becomes president, or the elections are repeated. Alberto Núñez Feijóo has no chance and can only rely on the second chance of new elections. In the PSOE, where previously it was trusted that Feijóo would fail if the inauguration failed, they now prefer that he not try because that way the clock will not start counting down the automatic call for elections. On Monday and Tuesday, the king will start consultations with the parties and it will become clear whether he is already proposing a candidate or waiting for the prospects to be clarified.
The PSOE and Sumar must resolve this complicated jumble of judgments in the process, in which they failed back in 2022, at great political cost. Now they are insisting on the progressive coalition with a novelty: the Spaniards have voted after the pardons, the incitement to hatred and embezzlement reforms and the agreements with EH Bildu. The right campaigned a lot with it. And yet the PSOE collected a million votes and won in Catalonia, where Sumar finished second. “They held a referendum and lost it,” Sánchez summed up in front of his deputies on Wednesday. The PSOE stresses that the political legitimacy of these negotiations is therefore complete.
The limitations are also obvious: the PSOE does not accept a term like amnesty, which some pro-independence think is non-negotiable. There is also no referendum on self-determination, the other big demand, although both junts and ERC appear to have put a damper on this case as the legal framework has been shown not to allow it. The incumbent executive seems ready to look for formulas to “remove the courts from the conflict in Catalonia”, the soft word used to talk about reducing penalties for those caught in Spain’s biggest political crisis of recent years are involved .
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The difficulties are great. There is some debate among legal scholars about the constitutionality of a general measure, similar to an amnesty. And he also faces a wide range of casuistry in the pending trials, from people who were in some way involved in 1-O’s illegal referendum to people involved in protest incidents for the verdicts of the trial’s leaders. But there is room for negotiation. PSOE and Sumar, with the support of Basque and Galician nationalism, are ready to seek legal solutions to somehow close the judiciary chapter six years later. Delicate weeks are coming, when political speeches must take place on legal grounds. The PSOE admits it has already started working out formulas, and Sumar – some of its leaders have publicly backed it – has set up a working group to draft a possible proposal. Regardless of the agreed formula, of course, the judges have the final say if it should come to deciding how to apply them.
Now it remains to be seen whether junts and ERC are ready to approve Sánchez’s inauguration. The independentists insist: without amnesty there will be no investiture. Things are pretty oiled at ERC after four years of agreements, but at Junts everything had to be done. And Puigdemont’s party is not satisfied with mere promises. “Charge in advance” has become one of their mottos. The incumbent government confirmed this on Thursday when it was forced to submit very early in the morning the application to the EU to allow the use of the co-official Spanish languages in its institutions, a requirement of Junt’s vote in Congress’ plenary session, which started at 10 a.m.
The PSOE and Sumar have dedicated the last few weeks to building bridges with those of Puigdemont. The Socialists have led the negotiations directly, with Ministers Félix Bolaños and María Jesús Montero and Organization Secretary Santos Cerdán dealing with Miriam Nogueras, Junts spokeswoman in Madrid and a very prominent role from Jordi Turull, Secretary General of those who were pardoned by Sánchez. According to Yolanda Díaz, she has also built bridges with contacts at the “highest level”. Díaz has a person very closely related to Puigdemont in former deputy Jaume Asens, suggesting Sumar will play a relevant role.
Negotiations around the Congress table have managed to build a little more trust, both sides admit, but there is still a lot left. Puigdemont himself has publicly insisted on this notion of distrust, which several leaders say is the big underlying problem. And there is another important point: the political recognition of Puigdemont. The possibility that someone from the PSOE at the highest level – most likely Cerdán – will have to travel to Brussels to meet him is a very sensitive matter but cannot be ruled out in the coming weeks. In Sumar, they assume that they must offer such a gesture.
In the coalition, they trust Junts to draw conclusions from the outcome of 23-J in Catalonia, according to various politicians polled: The Catalans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Sánchez’s coalition – first and second parties – and in favor of launching a PP to avoid vox government. A repeat of the elections could pave the way to the right and lead to enormous frustration in Catalonia, stress these leaders, who believe it will strain negotiations. In junts, on the other hand, they insist that their people are not concerned, that they are not afraid to go back to the polls and that what matters is what is achieved in the negotiations
There will be many big words in the coming weeks and times, when the spirit of the new elections will come back to the table. But the negotiations of the last few days have shown several things, according to the leaders of the incumbent government and the independentists. First, that there was a will not to break and that a high degree of discretion was therefore maintained. Secondly, that Junts, like ERC before them, decided to play politically, a very important change for a formation that has wanted to do almost nothing for the last four years and has even ended up outside the Catalan government. And third, much has changed since 2019, when the PSOE called snap elections after the independentists rejected the budget because they called for a party table with an interim rapporteur.
The socialists have opened up avenues that were unthinkable a few years ago, such as pardons. A year ago they voted against allowing the use of the co-official languages in Congress, which has now been accepted. The independentists have also changed and seem poised to open the game. The political reality in Spain, where the two blocs have consolidated, is pushing for an understanding between the coalition and the pro-independence movement, which is currently the only viable form of government if there is no agreement between the PP and the PSOE. “This is the real Spain, that’s what the citizens are voting for,” emphasizes the coalition.
Nobody knows what the outcome will be. In addition to the content of the negotiations, the key at the last moment will lie in the political incentives. Is Junts interested in politics or would he prefer a re-election? ERC and Sumar certainly don’t want that. Indeed, some independentists believe it may be Sánchez who may be tempted to repeat this, taking advantage of Thursday’s rogue right and the possible demobilization it will bring to his electorate. The president has a clear message, they explain: he is demanding a stronger majority in order not to give in more than is reasonable for junts.
In the PSOE, they insist that re-election, which failed back in 2019, is not an option. Plan A is to dig deep into the investiture negotiations. And they are willing to go far because they understand that the time has come and that they have political legitimacy even when the boundaries are clear. Redials will always be there, hovering over negotiations, but precisely to avoid them. There are also no exact time calculations, although negotiators believe it will take a long time. Sánchez faces yet another seemingly impossible twist in his Resistance Manual.
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