There is a question that is beginning to be repeated in the ministries and that no one dares to answer with certainty: how much time is left? Not for the next vacation. Not even for the next Council of Ministers. If not, how much time is left in the legislature. How many months do ministers still have to open their folders, rescue the laws trapped in Congress and get them to the BOE before Pedro Sánchez pronounces the words that will end everything: general elections.
Only one person knows the answer. Pedro Sánchez jealously guards the date. What’s more, play with her. And around the president, one of those exercises that are so common at the end of terms has been installed: interpreting the boss. The ministers listen to his words, study his movements and place bets. Also his deputies, who even ask the journalists themselves. A statement here. A trip there. The Budgets. The international agenda. The parliamentary calendar. Any clue is useful to try to find out when he plans to press the button. But nobody knows.
And this uncertainty is beginning to cause concern in different government departments.. Because behind the electoral pool there is a much more prosaic problem: there are ministers who do not know if they will have time to finish what they started. And for a minister, his reform portfolio is the endorsement with which to try to have something to say in the next cycle within the PSOE.
In some of the scenarios circulating within the Executive there would be only four effective months left in the legislature. Four months to unblock a Congress where pending regulations accumulate and where the Government needs to build an impossible majority every time it wants to approve something. The ministers do the math. There are projects that have been waiting for months. Others still require a very long process.
And some departments are not even aware of which of their initiatives will ultimately make it onto the priority list for the latest parliamentary “sprint.” The traffic jam forces us to choose. And choosing also means assuming which laws can die with the legislature. The Law of Criminal Procedure It is among the reforms for which material time would hardly exist if the shorter calendar were imposed, while the modification of the so-called gag law would be among those that the Executive could still try to unravel. In any case, everything leads up to December.
One of the hypotheses being handled by the Government is to present a Christmas General State Budget, loaded with social content, and use it as a great electoral poster. So if the accounts were rejected, a scenario would open that could lead to the polls at the end of February or beginning of March. That is the date that sounds the most.
Sánchez, meanwhile, publicly maintains his intention to reach 2027. He has ruled out making the general elections coincide with the municipal and regional ones. But between saying 2027 and indicating a specific Sunday there are several months of difference. And for a minister those four months can be almost an entire legislature. At that moment the race to take positions will begin.
The big problem is that in all these calculations Ceuta has been crossed. The Government had imagined another beginning of the course. After months of enduring the wear and tear caused by corruption cases, Moncloa intended to regain control of the public conversation and talk again about housing, social protection and management.
The plan was to gradually abandon the defensive terrain and begin to show the work of government with which Sánchez wants to present himself again to the Spanish people when the time for the polls arrives.
But Ceuta has devoured that plan. The crisis has shown the Executive how difficult it is to manage an emergency of such magnitude and, simultaneously, deploy the political agenda that it had prepared. Two recent actions by Sánchez on housing barely made their way into the public conversation. “We have everything stopped, the truth is,” concedes a minister.
And in Moncloa they have taken note. Some plans and announcements of social measures have slowed down. Not necessarily because they have disappeared from the agenda, but because there is a risk of consuming them at a time when Ceuta occupies practically all the political oxygen. A Government that wanted to start talking about the future continues to be obliged to explain the present. But the calendar does not grant respite.
Every week dedicated to Ceuta is one less week to try to change the political framework. Each postponed announcement comes a little closer to an election whose date is unknown even to those who sit around the Council of Ministers table every Tuesday. And every law that remains stuck in Congress begins to compete against the clock. That’s why nerves don’t just have to do with the elections. They have to do with what will happen before.
Ministers continue to gather their teams, prepare projects and defend their respective agendass. But now they work with an unknown on the table. They don’t know which of their laws will reach the BOE, which will die in Congress or how much time they have to try. Sánchez continues saving the date. And while the president looks towards the polls, his ministers start looking at the clock. The sources consulted also admit that the possibility of revalidating the Government is almost zero.
In both the PSOE and the Government, the certainty has been established that the objective is to try to save the furniture and avoid a resounding failure. Everyone assumes that the PP and Vox will add a sufficient majority and that, after the pacts in Andalusia, Aragon and Castilla y León, the right will sign an pact to enter the Council of Ministers hand in hand.
Pedro Sánchez needs to convince his people again. Ceuta has not only opened a crisis on the border. It has also opened a credibility gap between the president and a part of the socialist and left-wing electorate that is worrying in La Moncloa. The diagnosis is already made. Now it’s time to try to repair it in any way possible.
And to do so, the Government wants to put Sánchez back on the showcase. Sources from his hard core consider that the time has come to increase the president’s public exposure and “optimize” his figure to recover a political initiative that he lost during the summer, when the massive influx of migrants on July 30 and 31 turned Ceuta into the center of gravity of the entire legislature without turning back.
The movement is already perceived. Sánchez has given several interviews in just a few days and his entourage is preparing new appearances. In Moncloa they believe that the president should personally assume a greater part of the explanation of what happened. Let Sánchez be the one to explain Sánchez. And that he uses that exhibition to try to rebuild the link with progressive voters who, according to the Executive’s internal analysis, have not finished accepting the story with which the Government has explained the crisis.
Because the problem is no longer just about recovering television minutes or changing the public conversation. The problem is credibility. Since tens of thousands of people crossed the border from Morocco, the Government has been forced to correct, complete or clarify some of the explanations offered about what happened. In truth, in Moncloa there are those who assume that the final blow was dealt by Ceuta. And that is why some see the president “outside of himself,” as if he had completely lost connection with reality after eight years in charge.