Since the end of PDeCAT's conference on Sunday, you can only hear three comments in Madrid: the legislature has got radically more difficult for the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez; president Carles Puigdemont has got so many (political) lives that we've already lost count; and the Aznar-Casado-Rivera triangle has already got to work with all options on the table in case PSOE doesn't find a way to negotiate with the Catalan government and it finds itself headed for Spanish elections earlier than expected.
The most curious part is that Madrid is wrapped up in its own narrative and its own political and media ecosystem is hiding the stories it's got right in front of it. The political death -temporary or not, we will see- of PDeCAT's coordinator, Marta Pascal, was announced days in advance. And when everyone got down to pulling hard to save private Pascal, the young politician was already out of the new leadership team because a political party is an ecosystem which survives around whoever guarantees it electoral victory and this, today, in the party which is heir to Convergència, is none other than president Puigdemont. Who was so naive as to think that with the municipal elections just around the corner and more than 400 mayoralties up for grab, they were going to declare Puigdemont the loser of the assembly? In what brainbox offices had they reached that conclusion?
There was only one thing that could happen at PDeCAT's congress and it did and, yes, Sánchez has a problem if he wants to act as if nothing happened. In the two days since, the Madrid government has sent two messages. The first, to Spanish public opinion: we're not going to hold out more than reasonable. The second, to the Catalan government, by turning the screws on certain political initiatives they had allowed. Flexible, as always, the foreign minister, Josep Borrell, has stepped up to the breach, and settled on the diplomatic offices abroad reopened by the Catalan government, questioning them for not having requested the corresponding reports from the ministry. Borrell has said that the law will be applied, which, within the ministry, has been interpreted by some as a veiled threat they'll be closed.
We'll also see how the planned meeting of the bilateral Spain-Catalonia commission turns out. The Catalan government wants the right to self-determination and the referendum on the agenda which Madrid opposes. Suddenly, Madrid has got up thinking "peaceful legislature? What peaceful legislature?" and that its 85 parliamentary deputies -out of 350- are just that, 15 fewer than 100. Very few. And, in PP headquarters, Mariano Rajoy's fiefdom until just days ago, there's a feeling of a return to the past. After more than 30 months without going there, José María Aznar has returned, satisfied and smug. The future of that house has never smelled as much of mothballs.