In an investiture process which is, for now, a boring and placid movement towards either the selection of the next Spanish prime minister or a repeat election on January 14th, this Wednesday, Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo agreed to meet in the Congress of Deputies. A ritual that was accepted by the two major Spanish parties and monitored by Felipe VI who, in a decision with a certain air of the head of state wanting to play politician, decided that the first to submit to an investiture vote would be the winner of the 23rd July elections, even though he was unable to show that he had the parliamentary majority necessary to be elected.
Sánchez is betting that Feijóo will get burnt by a failed investiture in which he is only supported by Vox and, perhaps, the two MPs of UPN and CC, yielding a total of 172 parliamentary deputies. He is four short of an absolute majority, which is arithmetically few, but politically it is an abyss. The scorched earth policy of his People's Party (PP) has destroyed any chance of an agreement to obtain those votes and Feijóo has just under a month to reverse this situation, either with the Basque Nationalists (PNV) which has repeatedly said no, or with Together for Catalonia (Junts), a party that is at the antipodes of the PP. The simple announcement of wanting to meet with Junts has already prompted hair to stand on end in wide sectors of the PP, including the party's leadership in Catalonia.
But Feijóo knows that today, after something that is already crystal clear is made official - that is, that Sánchez is only waiting for the PP leader to fail before stepping in himself to seek the investiture - some movement will have to be made so that the weeks remaining until September 26th and 27th do not become eternal. And the only moves he can make are with the PNV and Junts. To keep some bridge open and for the talks with the PNV and Junts to stay alive, at least for a while, the PP has made a gesture towards them, and far from preventing them from forming parliamentary groups in the Senate on the grounds that they do not meet the conditions and are basing their request on borrowed PSOE senators, the Spanish conservatives have requested a report from the lawyers of the chamber. It's a way of buying time and not slamming the door in their face.
In parallel to these conversations involving Feijóo, the alternative bloc that Sánchez might bring together, which would reach, all up, 178 deputies, continues to work on the legal framework to support the amnesty for all the judicial cases of the last decade in which a direct relationship can be established with the Catalan independence process. We would not just be talking about the events of October 1st, 2017 and afterwards, but rather, finding the exact moment when the judicial persecution started - the origins of Operation Catalonia can be placed in the summer of 2012 - and which would also include the entire chapter related to the informal independence consultation of 2014, under the presidency of Artur Mas, and which is still being dragged through the Court of Accounts.
But the theatre of politics has these things: in order to address the amnesty in public, the meeting between Sánchez and Feijóo must first be cremated, at the same time helping to consolidate Spain's bipartisan politics, which, with so many elections has slowly reconstituted, to the detriment of the hinge parties.