Catalonia enters into question mode and could be like this for two months, until the summer, a time that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, gains to try to use the good result of the PSC at the polls as a personal boost in the European elections of 9 June. Some elections that, a priori, were in the cards for the Popular Party, and that now gain in tension and influence over what may happen in the coming months in the national legislature.
Even though the PP achieved a result well above expectations on Sunday, the Europeans are today a greater burden for them and for their leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who is the one who will be examined the most in his opposition policy.
Sánchez is also examined because, in the end, these elections are a plebiscite of the previous general ones, but Catalonia introduces an element of distortion that the PSOE believes can work in its favor to “give the finishing touch” to Feijóo. The socialists always move in the short term, without taking into account that they cannot ignore that equation that maintains that everything that is good for Salvador Illa will be bad, sooner or later, for Sánchez in Madrid.
But as the negotiation will drag on, and the noise coming from Catalonia will be confusing, the socialist side is now preparing to face these European elections with more enthusiasm and under the motto that they are the party that has managed to pacify Catalonia. Be careful, because in Catalonia, however, the parties make a different analysis and do not take the PSC result so much in the sense that it is an endorsement of Sánchez's policy in Madrid, but rather as a very harsh punishment for bad management. from ERC to the Generalitat.
But in the end the European campaign, which is already underway, will be nationalized by both parties, and the result in Catalonia forces the already popular socialists to change the script. The PSOE, to take advantage of what they understand to be a “success” and the recognition that their concessions have served to reduce the power of the independence movement: they even hope to turn the page on a generation of leaders who are the ones who are hindering Catalonia move forward and get out of the stagnation in which the “procés” has placed it.
The PP maintains the demonstration it has called against the amnesty on the eve of the European elections
In the PP, which today will analyze Sunday's result in its Executive Committee, they are very happy with their 15 seats, which they attribute to their involvement in Feijóo's campaign, although they serve as an alibi for their regional leader, Alejandro Fernández, to show off their chest. and vindicate himself before all those who did not share the decision that he repeat as a candidate. Among those critics were some of the main swords of the national leadership, and their opinion remains the same, to the point that yesterday they were already commenting in Genoa that with another candidate they could have even gotten close to 20 seats.
In any case, Sunday's result shields Alejandro Fernández from the Catalan PP congress that is still pending, despite the fact that the campaign has not served to overcome the discomfort in which Feijóo and he move when they are together. The lists for these elections were made by Genoa, and Madrid also aspires to control the organization chart of the new regional leadership.
In any case, satisfaction with Sunday's result is linked to that increase in pressure on what is at stake in the European Championships. Feijóo needs to mobilize the entire party, and make him feel concerned in elections that affect him personally in the assessment of his leadership, but also the entire PP in its national fight against the PSOE.
Today he will have a first lunch with the barons to begin preparing for these European elections, and here he must begin to lay the foundations for that mobilization of the PP that must place the engine at the level of revolutions that general elections require. If this does not happen, and the distance between the two main parties is small, Sánchez will have managed to round out his objectives without this altering his situation of parliamentary precariousness in Madrid, which threatens to be aggravated by the result of the pacts in Catalonia.
Sánchez knows that his hands are tied to ERC and Junts while the amnesty is not final
In fact, if the European elections go well for the PSOE, and Junts definitively breaks in Madrid, in the socialist ranks they are already speculating about the possibility that Sánchez will dare to call general elections with the hope that his policy “of reconciliation, dialogue and “coexistence” has been a success and it is time to ask the Spaniards for a broader endorsement to govern with more ease at the national level.
His policy in Catalonia has been measured only in that autonomous community, but it has not passed the filter of the rest of the national territory, neither the amnesty nor the rest of the transfers to the independence movement. And this is what will also be put to the test in the European elections in June. In relation to Catalonia, the ERC crisis opens a framework of uncertainty in which the socialists play with the possibility that there will finally be a tripartite, because ERC cannot afford to send almost two thousand officials to unemployment, or even speculate on an agreement with Junts, in which Carles Puigdemont agreed to step aside.
All scenarios are open, and even the PP wants to enter the fight for the distribution of positions in the new Table of the Catalan Parliament, which has to be established coinciding with the European vote. In this new framework, the PP maintains the demonstration it has called against the amnesty on the eve of the start of the European campaign, but they themselves are aware that the strength of this call will depend on the movements made by ERC and Junts.
And Pedro Sánchez's two partners have their hands tied until they see the amnesty definitively approved in Congress.