What is going to happen with the votes in the Congress of Deputies after Carles Puigdemont’s breakup announcement? Well, it depends on who you ask. From the Government, both the PSOE and Sumar, insist on trying to put the coup into perspective and trust that they will be able to pass laws that are “good for Catalonia”, as Junts requests. However, many parliamentary partners of Pedro Sánchez do not share this indifference and consider that the legislature, which was already weak, has fallen into a period of “agony” that is difficult to emerge from.
In his appearance on Monday, Puigdemont announced that he considered all bridges with the PSOE broken, that the investiture pact had ended and that Junts was not going to negotiate anything more with the socialists. However, He did not specify that he was going to vote against everything and he left the door open to support the regulations that, in his opinion, are good for the autonomous community. In Moncloa this has given space to forced optimism.
According to sources from the socialist wing of the Government, the Executive and its parliamentary groups are going to bring laws to Congress that will be very difficult for Junts to vote against, reports Javier Portillo. “We are going to take them into an abyss on some issues and they will have to portray themselves,” they say from the Moncloa. This is a strategy that they have already put into practice with Podemos and that they believe can work again. A recent example of this: the purple ones were speaking out against the arms embargo on Israel and in the end not only did they not abstain, but they ended up voting in favor so that they would not be blamed if it fell.
Speaking of regulations that exclusively affect post-convergents, the Government finds it difficult to believe that Junts is going to vote against laws such as Customer Service. The Puigdemont party managed to sneak in an amendment so that companies have to serve in the co-official languages and it would be difficult to explain now that they are going to overturn it. The rest of the partners also managed to have their amendments to the text accepted, so support for the standard was practically guaranteed.
However, the extent of this rupture will be measured first, with the financing decree of the Commonwealth law. The Executive intends to bring the validation to a vote within two weeks (there will be no Plenary next week) and it is also difficult to believe that Junts will vote against.
In fact, Sumar believes that on social issues they can force Junts to retract. “We have to be intelligent and take them to areas where civil society can be used to pressure”explain sources from the plurinational group. “In very transcendent regulations they can play with the control of time, but there are others in which they are not going to risk turning civil society against them,” they add. That argument, however, is the one championed Yolanda Diaz for the reform of the working day and Junts unceremoniously knocked it down.
However, the Government’s parliamentary partners do not share the optimism that seems to come from the Council of Ministers. Several parliamentary sources explain that they believe nothing is going to explicitly change in the short term, because the Executive already had to sweat blood for each vote and Junts only voted in favor of what it could capitalize on politically, but that parliamentary activity is going to be reduced, even further, to a stalemate in which Pedro Sánchez ends up having to call elections.
The spokesperson in the PNV Congress spoke publicly about it, Maribel Vaquero. When asked if he believed that the legislature is still viable, he answered that “it is not very sustainable, the truth is, we are entering a phase of agony.” “If the Government does not manage to gather a positive majority, it is an unsustainable phase until the end of the legislature. An agreement would need to be reached, the Budgets could be. But it does not depend on us,” he added. That is, he entrusts Sánchez to try to recompose the majority of the investiture “around some project that is important.”
There are voices in Moncloa who, within their optimism, believe that if Sánchez presents a Budget to the Congress of Deputies with large allocations for Catalonia, they will also put Junts in a difficult position. Even partners such as the PNV itself or Sumar are in favor of the Government taking the Budgets to the Lower House. However, everything indicates that they will clash again with Puigdemont. The leader of Junts had already been telling José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for weeks that he would not talk about Budgets without unblocking the other pending negotiations and, on Monday, he made it clear that he would not have public accounts.