Lehendakari Urkullu already warned this before the investiture of Pedro Sánchez: if he was invested, Unlike the previous legislature, it would need “all the votes, of all the parties that have elected him, all the time. From saying to fact. The Government does not yet have the necessary votes to validate the three decrees that will be debated on Wednesday in Congress.
This result draws the current Spanish parliamentary scenario: of a situation of imperfect bipartisanship we have been evolving to a bibloquism no less imperfect. The blocks on stage do not respond so much to a programmatic axis as to two fronts of mutual rejection. On the ideological level, in the investiture bloc left-wing forces coexist, such as the coalition between PSOE and Sumar, with the sovereignist left (ERC, Bildu and BNG), center-right nationalism (JxCat and PNV) and the accidentalism of the Coalition Canary. And if they are united by the rejection of a uniform and standardizing Spain, it cannot be said that they share a specific model of plurinational Spain.
Regardless of the result of Wednesday’s test, It is evident that in government action it will be increasingly complex to have all the votes of the investiture at all times with components of such heterogeneous interests. In this case, there are two very different partners who still resist giving their endorsement. On one side, JxCat, in a more tactical than strategic position, He argues that the decrees aggravate the underfinancing of Catalonia, represent a reduction in powers and make the application of the amnesty difficult. On the other hand, Podemos: after leaving the Sumar group, poses the first difficulties to the Government in the third of the decrees, promoted by the Ministry of Labor, on labor measures that includes the reform of unemployment benefits.
The other two decrees that are subject to validation are the one that extends part of the anti-crisis package to 2024 and an omnibus decree that includes other measures related to the receipt of European funds and includes the transposition into Spanish legality of the preliminary ruling questions before the CJEU. , which according to Junts can become a resource to stop the application of the amnesty but which, as ERC itself recognizes, does not represent any change in the current situation. The endorsement of this text, as the Government insists, depends on whether Spain can receive the fourth batch of Next Generation funds.
The president of the PP has shown himself willing to promote the abstention of his group, the first in the Chamber, to validate the decree in exchange for three conditions in the form of amendment, modifications (these, and some of those that bother the bloc of the investiture) that They will be easier to integrate if the decree were processed as a bill. Something that the Government could have done from the outset, facilitating the debate of each of the measures based on the general interest, instead of presenting a closed menu to its partners on which to position itself as a block.
It is evident, in any case, that the panorama drawn is sterile for the interests of citizens. The PSOE and the PP, as major government parties, must recover political transversality in State issues. Anti-crisis policy and the imperatives of Brussels are some of them.