After having failed to pass votes on two laws as different as the one that sought to punish procurement of prostitution, on Wednesday, and that of urban land use, on Thursday, perhaps the Spanish prime minister has concluded that one thing are the fireworks that he constantly lets off to divert attention from the problems before him, and another very different question is whether, as things stand, the legislature has much more time left. The fiction created by Pedro Sánchez of being able to avoid facing the difficulties with his partners that have been steadily created through political deals has meant that his political solitude is growing and that even his governing partner, Sumar, has left him on his own in the occasional significant vote.
It is no longer a question of not being able to present a budget, something that on its own is already enough to bring down a government in other countries, but rather that the legislative paralysis, at this rate, is beginning to resound loudly. His movement in Catalonia to blow open the election campaign with his fake resignation certainly mobilized Socialist voters, who are numerous in Catalonia in Spanish elections but not so much in Catalan ones. A chasm has emerged in the relationship between Junts and the PSOE, which was embodied in the Congress of Deputies in the treatment that Sánchez dispensed to Míriam Nogueras.
The siren songs coming from the Spanish executive asserting that they can continue to govern without Junts do not seem realistic today and the numbers no longer add up. This relationship will not get better, since between them there is the question of the Catalan presidency, which the Catalan Socialists (PSC) demand as the winner on the 12th May, while Puigdemont proposes that the Socialists abstain to facilitate his election, something that has been rejected by land, sea and air. For this reason, Sánchez has taken direct action using his characteristic skills in the area to make people talk about other things. First it was his threatened, then withdrawn, resignation; then there was the controversy with Milei, the disgraceful Argentine president, and after that it will be something else. All of this, so as not to mention the reality: he has lost his parliamentary majority and regaining it forces him to do things he is not willing to do.
Sánchez has lost his parliamentary majority and regaining it forces him to do things he is not willing to do
In this context, we are at the start of the campaign for the European elections, which will end up being a thermometer of the political health of Sánchez and Feijóo. As always, the CIS public polling agency came out to warm them up by awarding a five-point victory to the Socialists. The experience we have of CIS predictions over quite a considerable time necessarily forces us to afford them little credibility and to interpret them in a partisan way. One day a serious reflection will have to be made on the public funds that are misappropriated for no other purpose than to support a political option. It will be rightly said that, to a greater or lesser degree, this has always happened, but never in the way that it is happening now and the use that was made of it in the past should not be a guarantee that it will always be so.
The European elections will also give us some clues on the direction in which Sánchez is sending the Spanish legislature at a time when no one rules anything. Nor a new electoral call sooner rather than later. And Feijóo? The president of the People's Party is silent. Meanwhile, in Catalonia, Together for Catalonia and the Republican Left face the European elections with the will to achieve results that will not be another rout and manage to maintain certain positions in the face of an electoral wave that will have a distinctly Spanish tint.