The interplay between Spanish executive laissez-faire and Spanish parliamentary prescription is such that, although after the stalemate arising from the July General Election, the formation of a government may well be delayed into the new year. Parliament must meet on 17 August and choose a speaker that same day for its four-year duration.
The choice of speaker, which would normally indicate the party most likely to form the new executive, might well, for the first time since the restoration of democracy after Franco's death in 1975, fall to a minor nationalist party; conceivably the Basque PNV. It is, however, unthinkable that it should fall to a Catalan nationalist deputy, despite the fact that the parliamentary arithmetic has gifted these deputies the role of kingmaker in the choice of the next Spanish PM.
While it is a given that they will not vote for Feijoo, the right-wing candidate for PM from the conservative PP party, the decision whether to back current acting PM Sanchez for a third term or alternatively refuse and thereby force a repeat election, as happened both in 2015 and in 2019, has set nerves jangling in Madrid, parliament, media and the judiciary. One eminent emeritus professor of constitutional law, Javier Perez-Royo, went so far as to assert that, should the constitutional provision for a repeat election be triggered yet again in 2023, that would sound the death knell for the 1978 Constitution.
The initial demands by Junts, the more intransigent of the two Catalan nationalist parties involved, were clear. A total amnesty for all those involved directly or indirectly in the 2017 independence push as well as a commitment to allow a referendum in Catalonia on the independence question were the conditions for their support of PM Sanchez.
Where formerly, for almost six years, the first of these topics had been routinely ruled out by PSOE on the grounds that the Spanish Constitution prohibits such amnesties, the aphrodisiac of four more years in power motivated senior PSOE figures into re-reading the Constitution. To nobody's surprise, they discovered that it is not amnesties per se which are prohibited but rather government-imposed amnesties. Legislative amnesties, with a parliamentary majority, are quite acceptable.
If they can give us an amnesty in return for our crucial final seven votes to bring about a coalition government supported by six parties (with only two parties, PSOE and Sumar, in the government) they can go the extra mile and give us a referendum, even if they have to call it something else, argue the hard liners in Junts. Or are these the sentiments of the solid base of Junts voters; without whom, should party leaders make the wrong call on a deal giving a third term for Sanchez, Junts cannot hope to be re-elected at any level? A vital question in principle, and in practice given that elections to the Catalan Parliament are due in just over 18 months.
Whilst victory for the right was almost a given in the lead up to the late July national election, the final tally of seats left almost everyone a loser, with the possible exception of current acting PM Pedro Sanchez who reacted to the complex distribution of seats with characteristic aplomb. He left town to take a summer break.
Though the conservative PP which won 136 seats performed reasonably close to what most polls predicted, its putative coalition partner Vox fell back badly dropping from 52 to 33 seats, a loss depriving these two parties of a majority in the 350-seat parliament. A smattering of individual seats are available to bolster the combined figure of 169, but the only possible source of significant support to reach 176 seats was the five votes of the Basque Nationalist Party PNV, who made clear they would in no circumstances support a government including Vox; a party which campaigns for the elimination of all 17 current regional parliaments in Spain. Even when Vox offered to support a PP government without itself taking cabinet posts, the PNV, doubtless mindful that Basque rival EH-Bildu won six seats in July, remained adamant.
This seems to preclude a right-wing government of any sort. And appears to hand the initiative to Sanchez, if he can garner support from the other four parties involved, including PNV. A considerable challenge with Junts is the final and most complicated piece in this parliamentary jigsaw.
Not that Junts is alone in the equation. ERC, the Catalan Republican Left, has seven seats, a tie with Junts. Yet most commentators see their continued support for Sanchez as a given; which was arguably confirmed when they recently announced they would support the PSOE candidate to be Speaker of the Parliament. However, later, ERC appeared to demand further concessions for this important deal.
Since 2017, ERC and Junts have increasingly diverged in their strategies to achieve independence; the bungled UDI project that year when they had formed a coalition government in Catalonia being the last moment of convergence between the parties. Inevitably, historical and personal antagonisms exist between the parties which often seem almost as important as any political discrepancies over independence. In 2017, Junqueras of ERC, then deputy Catalan PM, surrendered to the courts in Madrid and subsequently served 42 months in jail. His boss, PM Carles Puigdemont from Junts, swiftly decamped for Brussels where a variety of rulings by courts in Belgium, in Germany and in the EU itself have kept him out of jail. Such circumstances make compromise between these parties all the more difficult.
While Junts has maintained an open belligerence towards Madrid, verbally if not factually, ERC has deliberately adopted the path of dialogue and of gradualism. The apogee of this tactic was a change to Spanish criminal law which eliminated sedition, the main charge against the jailed Catalan politicians, coupled with a conditional pardon for them. Though neither of these moves in any way limited the zeal of the judiciary to track down and punish even peripheral actors in the 2017 debacle. This was seen the day after the General Election when Professor Clara Ponsati was ordered to be arrested on the streets of Barcelona by an examining magistrate from Madrid.
The nadir of the gradualism posture was the round table for negotiations between the Spanish and the Catalan governments which ran through the second part of the last Sanchez-Podemos legislature. But which ran into the ground even at its first meeting in Barcelona in September 2021, when Sanchez literally abandoned the camera-festooned political table, swapping it for a rival table on a sun-drenched terrace where he drank coffee and smiled for the cameras alongside his local lieutenant Salvador Illa. Not quite the most diplomatic way to end centuries of Madrid-Barcelona political tensions; nor to convince nationalist voters that their greivances were being taken seriously in Madrid.
In the July election, electoral support for Junts fell and it lost one of eight deputies in Madrid; ERC however lost six out of 13. The latter figure is so telling that even the hitherto solid support for its leader Oriol Junqueras has begun to seem less certain. Calls for a joint position by ERC-Junts in negotiating with PSOE-Sumar were heard from the first minute but recent history makes any such common front hard to conceive and harder to maintain.
Junts must decide both sides of the same coin; how high it wants to pitch its demands in return for supporting Sanchez and also how little it is willing to settle for. The urgent need to protect the status of the Catalan language, both from the depradations of globalisation as well as from the incursions of the national judiciary into language programmes and preferences in Catalan schools, will perhaps be one of the most basic of pillars in any settlement reached.
However, the experience of the last legislature showed that Sanchez had scant interest in achieving more than a symbolic and superficial solution to the Catalan problem. And that ERC was willing to settle for little more than the minimum. So now it falls to Junts to try to exact a high price and even more importantly to make the Spanish Government and parliament stick to any political agreements made.
Jim Scott is a retired Glasgow-born teacher who spent most of his career in England. He first visited Spain in 1973 and has been resident in a 'Catalan heartland' since 2005
