Spanish politics is going through such a cyclothymic moment that from the same government loudspeakers, through which last Monday it was leaked to the media that they were so pessimistic about the spending ceiling that they already considered the Budgets of the 25th to be lost, yesterday, however, The message was that they had the capacity to get Congress to approve another spending ceiling in two or three weeks that meets Carles Puigdemont’s demands, and that this would allow the budget project for the next year to be presented to Parliament in November, at the latest. .
In the same way, the same “peons” close to the former president of the Generalitat, who prophesied the immovable “no” to Sánchez, for everything and forever, yesterday, however, opened themselves to the same possibility that if the demand to change the spending ceiling – already raised to Parliament on two occasions without it having managed to move forward – with one more transfer, the Budget ball will continue to roll. Listening to both parties, if it were necessary to bet today, there will be a spending ceiling, modified from the initial project, and we must not close the door on there also being new Budgets. From black to possible white in a matter of hours and in exchange for new concessions.
This means that pragmatism is imposed with respect to the particular interests of the two parties, and that the pressures from the Catalan, economic and financial sphere, exerted directly on Puigdemont to allow the legislature to continue running out of self-interest, and because It is also good for this establishment that the current political framework is maintained.
Everything that accompanies the relationship between Sánchez and Puigdemont is, above all else, staging, and Moncloa and the independence movement collaborate almost equally in this. The amnesty – and the control of the Government of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Constitutional Court – are also decisive in the turns in the speech and in the decisions of the independentists, just as in the Government these turns are justified in that not even they themselves believe that it will give It is the same to have or not have Budgets or that one can remain in power, without relevant damages, without approving new accounts.
Those who in recent days have had the opportunity to speak with Puigdemont again have heard that old message that his intention is to make Sánchez “sweat blood.” His priorities are two: the first, to make the amnesty effective for his benefit and to be able to return to Catalonia; and the second, kill ERC politically, and for the latter it has to continue in the battle of the continuous pulse with the President of the Government to talk about new concessions. Two facts act against these goals: that the amnesty is no longer only in the hands of the Government, but also of the Supreme Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union; and that the margin to hide from public opinion that agreements are reached with Madrid that later do not materialize is increasingly smaller. The social base behind Puigdemont is very radicalized, and Junts is fully aware that it is very difficult for them to explain to them that at this point new agreements are still being reached with Sánchez. Those decisions that in Madrid have a reading of new humiliation to the coalition Government are not read, among this independence militancy, as proof that Sánchez is being made to “sweat blood.”
If the President of the Government manages to carry out the Budgets in a framework like this, after having placed Salvador Illa in the Presidency of the Generalitat, he will have a clear field to calmly implement his announcement that he will exhaust the legislature. It is not clear how far the investigations of the “Koldo case” and those that affect his family, his wife and his brother will go, but they could hardly drag Sánchez into an electoral advance when he has the complicity of the majority of his partners to watch to the other side.
Neither Sumar nor PNV nor ERC will raise these issues, and neither is Puigdemont’s party doing so so far. The feeling that predominates among all of them is that the socialist leader is already moving where he has to in order to end up controlling the pieces necessary to stop the blows. Even Podemos is quite quiet.
For now, Moncloa has bought time and is willing to seal new “fixes” with Puigdemont to keep him within the machinery that assists the President of the Government. Puigdemont still does not have the amnesty and has not managed to fulfill other commitments that he agreed with Sánchez knowing that they had no possibility of being executed, such as the imposition of Catalan in the EU. Something very similar happens to ERC with the Catalan quota.