What began in Murcia, continued with the calling of elections in Madrid, set in motion a crisis that could end with the disappearance of Ciudadanos, led to the first failed experiment in the laboratory of Socialist strategy guru Iván Redondo, and finally sent the political share price of Díaz Ayuso soaring on the market, had a new and unexpected plot twist on Monday. Spain's second deputy prime minister, Pablo Iglesias, is to leave the executive to run for the presidency of the Community of Madrid. Although this move is much less epic than you would think from his explanation on social media - since, in essence, he is attempting to prevent Podemos from suffering a disastrous defeat in the regional elections of May 4th, at a time when some polls have even predicted the disappearance of the left-wing party - it does reveal the point of generosity of a controversial character, ready to take a gamble and much braver than the average member of the political class, since he embarks on this adventure with much more to lose than he stands to gain.
All this is happening just one month after the holding of the Catalan elections on February 14th, and is producing such major ramifications in Spanish politics that the disagreements between Catalan parties ERC and Junts, despite being important or very important - big enough that they could even threaten the agreement on a new government - seem much more manageable than the territory that Madrid politics is heading into. Because no matter how much it is a question of separating the convulsion of Spanish politics from what has happened in recent years in Catalonia, it is inseparable. The emergence of the pro-independence space as a majority, first in seats and after 14th February also in votes, approaching 52% of the vote, has triggered a series of seismic movements, ranging from the fact that Pedro Sánchez has been left naked on the issue of pardons for the political prisoners, to altering the political agenda of the coming months.
Among other reasons, because the epicentre of the interests of Spanish parties will now be blatantly fixed above Madrid, at least until the summer, and Catalan issues will be pushed to the background when not absolutely frozen. Not those that have to do with the normalization of relations between the two governments, in which it seems more than difficult to move beyond anything more than just a photo to get it out of the way, but also with regard to issues that have little or nothing to do with Catalan independence, such as the announced manufacture of electric car batteries in Martorell. After Pedro Sánchez's announcement in Barcelona, it seems that sales season has now opened and Spain's deputy PM for ecological transition, Teresa Rivera, is already talking about making batteries in Martorell as well as in other territories. In other words, if the slogan was once "café for everyone", the Sánchez government is now embarking on a political operation of "batteries for everyone".
But back to Iglesias. Once the first reaction of bewilderment has passed, the question remaining on the table about his manoeuvre is this: strategic or suicide? Right now it has more of the second than the first. But if Spanish politics was trying for a while to resemble Borgen - the famous Danish television series - and incorporate a certain dose of idealism into the management of public affairs, in a matter of weeks it has moved to the French Baron Noir, a series that is more brutal and closer to what actually happens.