Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz They announced this Tuesday an agreement that no one doubted that it was going to happen no matter how much intrigue their respective communication teams, especially those of Sumar, wanted to put into it. PSOE and Sumar They presented themselves to the 23J elections as a common front to stop a hypothetical agreement between the PP and Vox. In fact, throughout the campaign, they assured that they only needed to get one more deputy to make it happen and they acted as a bloc. They cannot govern without the support of Esquerra, Junts, Bildu, PNV and BNG. And they still don’t have it insured. The step taken is necessary, but in no case is it surprising nor definitive. The uncertainty, little or much, remains the same. Proof of this is that the candidate Sánchez, appointed by the King as he requested, still has not asked for a date to appear in Congress. And four days ago he was complaining about Feijóo’s delay in that same procedure.
The interested parties themselves have wanted to focus on the economic aspects, especially labor, of the agreement with the reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours as the star measure. Without a doubt, it is an attractive measure, especially for a certain type of workers, those in the industrial sector, one of the few in which unions continue to have high representation. Focusing the investiture pact between the parties that will form the Government if they achieve the necessary majority during the working day is something irresponsible. The hypothetical goodness of this measure cannot hide that it is something that needs to be discussed with social agents, also with employers, since the reduction of working hours impacts the competitiveness of companies unless it is accompanied by an agreement on productivity and taxation. In any case, the responsible thing would have been to announce that the Government will try to create the necessary conditions for social agents to reach an agreement on this issue. It is also irresponsible to link this hypothetical reduction in working hours to job creation, a premise that the French case has already dismantled. There is something worse than not improving conditions for workers, which is creating false expectations. If you really want to move forward there, it would be more useful to talk, for example, about a intergenerational income pact. The rest of the measures announced in this first version of the pact are also very generic, although they all indicate a substantial improvement in workers’ conditions, greater public services and more demanding taxation. All of this is difficult to implement in an economy like the Spanish one loaded with public debt and obliged to adjust in accordance with the new EU tax rules by 2024. In addition to linking this entire economic package with the rest of the partners’ demands that they need.
Sánchez tries to create the conditions so that his investiture is unavoidable. He, therefore, puts more pressure on the rest of the parties with which he negotiates, including the PSOE itself, which on Saturday will be put in the position of passing the agreement with Sumar for approval by the militants. without knowing the conditions of the rest of the partners that the future president plans to accept. It is true that they will not share the Government, but it is still an atypical exercise even if it is with the intention of stopping Vox.