It is not good news that Spanish deputy PM Pablo Iglesias and finance minister María Jesús Montero are throwing plates at each other when there are less than two weeks left before the start of an atypical school year. With the huge concern among families on what will happen, how much infection there will be and what a hypothetical closure of a Covid-19 infected school will be like, a public debate on whether the Spanish government will provide paid leave for parents who have children sent home to quarantine without being positive to the virus, is frivolous, shows huge incompetence, and creates uncertainty and unnecessary stress for families.
It is not a question of one being a good cop (Iglesias) and the other a bad cop (Montero), but rather, that the government must be able to provide answers in a coherent way to the problems that arise. They have had plenty of time over the summer to put a proposal on the table that is backed by internal consensus and doesn't end up passing the buck to parents - and perhaps the criticism of the holidays taken by some ministers and the prime minister himself is not so excessive if it now turns out that everything is still to be settled. Also, let it not be an empty gesture like the minimum income scheme, which many potential recipients complain that they have still not received.
Governing does not mean going one way now and and another way later. Nor is it about coming to the rescue of a department for which your party holds the portfolio, which is what Pablo Iglesias has done with the employment ministry. Especially because, in the end, the money from the benefits depends on who said no to it, and in this case it is none other than the minister of finance. Iglesias has now given his last word and guaranteed that parents with children in quarantine after a negative PCR test will receive paid leave. The politics of now yes, now no, has to come to an end and it must be insisted on that in such things which have very little rhetoric about them, the executive should speak with one voice.
And meanwhile, Arrimadas is at the government palace accepting Sánchez's invitation: yes to negotiating the budget and, with an explicit wish, she says, for dialogue, and for the budget to lose its ideology. That is, for it to be as right wing as possible.