In the coming days, Together for Catalonia (Junts) and the Republican Left (ERC) will have to address the composition of the Bureau of the Catalan Parliament and they have before them the real possibility that whoever is at the head of it - the speaker of the house - will be a pro-independence candidate. This is so because the voting system is beneficial to them, since the votes for yes, no, and abstention, and the possibility that each political party has the alternative of voting for its own candidate, give these two independentist parties room for manoeuvre if their 55 deputies are capable of taking a unified stand. The main unknown is whether they will be able to come to agreement or whether, on the other hand, they might prefer alternative alliances - this is where the game of the Catalan Socialists (PSC) lies - since they could be undone by the enmity that has built up in recent times, which has led to an endless sum of mutual reproaches.
The arithmetic appears simple. Junts (35) and ERC (20) account for 55 parliamentarians and the PSC (42) and the alternative left Comuns (6) have 48. From here, the two parliamentary groups also arithmetically important are the People's Party (PP, with 15) and far-right Vox (11), because the far-left CUP (4) and the xenophobic Catalan Alliance (2) are irrelevant in any possible combination. The question is what the Catalan deputies of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal will do. There is the precedent of the Barcelona City Council, in which the PP voted to elect Jaume Collboni to the mayoralty of Barcelona for free and this could happen again. It is true that Feijóo has commented several times in private that that was a mistake, since many of his voters did not understand it and, in part, Vox's electoral resistance in Catalonia has to do with that botched decision, since the extremist party has been able to present itself in Catalonia as well-removed from any support for the Socialists.
An agreement to occupy Catalonia's second institution would send a first message after the defeat of the independentists on May 12th
The voting system for the speaker of the Catalan Parliament makes it easy for each party to vote for whoever they want as speaker, and both PP and Vox are inclined to vote for their own candidates, even if they have no chance of winning. This would be the first option, ahead of supporting one of the two blocs, which, in their political discourse, are quite similar, given the agreements that the four parties have in Madrid in support of Pedro Sánchez. In this situation, 55 pro-independence deputies are more than the 48 of the Socialist bloc, because what is certain is that the 48 parliamentarians are united in this struggle at least. Depending on how the election for the presidency of the Generalitat ends in the coming weeks or months and how the game is played by Salvador Illa and Carles Puigdemont, the two who have said they aspire to the investiture, it is obvious that an agreement to occupy Catalonia's second institution would send a first message after the defeat of the independentists on May 12th.
It is appropriate to say this now, writing a few hours before this Thursday's final approval of the amnesty law, which has cost an arm and a leg to push through the legislature due to the obstacles that the PP and Vox have put in its way. But it has made progress when Junts and ERC have worked jointly to create the political framework for its approval. Earlier on, Pedro Sánchez said that its approval was impossible, yet his discourse turned inside out when he found himself with no other choice, since, without the amnesty he would have been obliged to call new elections and lose the opportunity to continue in government. From this Thursday, conflict with the judges will arrive, and will be neither easy nor short. In some cases the legal process will take time and we will see in the next few hours what moves the Supreme Court makes once the law has been passed and only pending the last step, that of publication in the official state gazette. Something that should take place this very Friday and will be possible if the Spanish presidency ministry, through the leadership of the government's Technical-Secretariat, the body responsible for the organization and control of publications, proceeds with the celerity that the law deserves.