Will February 2nd be the date on which Pedro Sánchez tosses his pro-independence partners into the gutter and then runs into the waiting arms of Ciudadanos where the needy Inés Arrimadas is waiting for him? With Spain's "no means no" leader having approved a touched-up labour reform bearing no resemblance to his commitment to repeal the earlier law - because Europe did not give him any margin - and having done it in agreement with the CEOE employers association, while no party on his left buys in, will he find a way to return his partners to the fold without Spanish employers getting angry? Has the great magician of broken promises run out of rabbits in top hats, just as he needs to do yet another of the usual tricks he pulls in cases where there is nothing behind the media pyrotechnics?
The validation of the decree amending the 2012 labour reform carried out by the Popular Party (PP) is, as Nicolas Tomás has explained in El Nacional, a real test for Pedro Sánchez and the leadership of Unidas Podemos. Which, moreover, occurs at the half-way mark of the legislature and with exams coming up soon for both the Socialists (PSOE) and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) - the latter being, for now, the main parliamentary ally and an essential crutch for Spain's minority government if they do not want to fall into the hands of a party with such a tendency to lean to the right as Ciudadanos (Cs).
With the Socialists tied down by Europe over Spain's rampant increase in public spending, they are under permanent watch from Brussels, which has ended up applying a political judo hold to ensure that labour law reform is no more than a touch-up on Mariano Rajoy's 2012 legislation. Between Brussels, on the one hand, and the employers of the CEOE on the other, the government is impeded from any amendments that could satisfy ERC, Bildu or Junts, and Sánchez is trying to perform pirouettes to convince as he has done up till now. Moreover, in just three weeks, he has the test of the elections in Castilla y León, an autonomous community in which the PP is very solidly placed to hold on to power either by an absolute majority - very difficult - or with the help of Vox.
To all of this is added the fragility of the coalition government with Unidas Podemos, accustomed, like the Catalan executive, to disagreements that are so permanent that they even seem to be part of the landscape. The clearest example was how the PSOE has passed minister Alberto Garzón (of the United Left, part of Unidas Podemos) through the shredder for statements about the Spanish meat industry which he didn't even utter. The pressure from the right-wing in both politics and media has been so great and the political waistline of the PSOE so tight that Garzón has ended up being criticized by everyone, even his government partners.
The situation of ERC is not much more comfortable in the face of the evolution of the Spanish legislature in which it has opted for parliamentary support for the Sánchez government, with little benefit so far. This has generated growing concern in ERC ranks, who need political triumphs to reassure their voters. In the midst of all this, an insufficient labour reform arrives as part of a dish which is, overall, too difficult to digest at this point in the legislature, and with many debts building up in terms of agreements made and unfulfilled by the PSOE.
Not to mention the dialogue table that was to meet at the beginning of January and which, at the moment, has neither a date for convening nor an agenda of topics to be discussed. And hanging over this casuistry is a widespread feeling that, for the Socialists, the Catalan agenda and the solution to the existing political conflict is not part of their priorities either in the short or in the medium term.