It seems that after having his head in the clouds for 24 days, that is, from the July 23rd Spanish general election until Wednesday afternoon, Pedro Sánchez has landed in the reality of the arithmetic: he lacks enough MPs to go ahead with the election of a Socialist (PSOE) speaker for Spain's lower house, the Congress, a post for which his party has chosen the deputy Francina Armengol, former autonomous community president of the Balearic Islands. The choice will be made this Thursday morning, and in order to secure the essential votes of the seven Together for Catalonia (Junts) deputies, acting prime minister Sánchez will have to fulfill Carles Puigdemont's final condition: "We cannot advance nationally on the basis of promises made by those who always fail to keep them, and that is why we need verifiable facts before committing to any vote." Verifiable facts, that's the crux of the matter.
After an attempt at leg-pulling on Wednesday morning, in which Sánchez, in a solemn tone, showed himself determined that, taking advantage of Spain's rotating presidency of the European Union, he would promote the use of Catalan and the rest of Spain's co-official languages in the EU institutions, a commitment he had already assumed in July 2022 and which was thus immediately rejected by Junts, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and even the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), the talks entered a different area of discussion. The big question is whether there is enough time to set down in black and white what Puigdemont demands for the constitution of the congressional governance organ, the Bureau, while the single member for the Canarian Coalition (CC) is also oscillating from one side to the other, which determines whether seat number 172 falls on the right or the left.
It seems we are talking about important actions of documentation to make it possible to start a compartmentalized legislature, as if, for example, it consisted of three major acts. The first, up until this Thursday, in which there has been an acting government at the reins and a parliament that does not yet have legislative power, since it has not been formally constituted. This would be the document that is being worked on most urgently. The second act, with the acting government still in office and a new parliament already able to legislate. This would be the phase that would start from tomorrow until the new government takes office - if that should eventuate. And the third and final act, a new government with all its powers and a parliament without limitations. Government and Parliament in unison, with a motion of no confidence always possible in case of flagrant non-compliance.
The main obstacles are threefold: time, the trustworthiness of Sánchez and the sale of the agreement to some pro-independence sectors. All this, assuming that the PSOE does not get up from the last-minute talks and move everything in a new direction. The leader of left-wing Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, who has revealed that she has spoken with Puigdemont, has played an active role, although not a decisive one. Yes, her work has apparently helped to make Sánchez put his feet on the ground of tangible and specific proposals.
The Catalan president-in-exile wants to have the documentation of the agreement tied up before giving consent, so as not to get his fingers burnt and lengthen the list of politicians with whom Sánchez has ended up failing to keep his promises. This is an enormously important issue in this final stretch before the constitution of the Bureau, which has ended up becoming the first match ball of the legislature. In any case, with only a few hours to go, at the time of writing, if nothing goes wrong and the PSOE does not - as on other occasions - resort to tricks, the most likely thing is that there will end up being an agreement and the Junts deputies will not torpedo the PSOE's holding of the speaker's position.
In any case, we will have to wait until Thursday morning to know with absolute certainty the final outcome. Because in politics, nothing is definitive until it happens.