Spain's interim leader Pedro Sanchez attends the opening session of the newly elected Congress of Deputies in Madrid on August 17, 2023. © Javier Soriano, AFP
Spain’s conservative leader saw his final bid to become prime minister rejected by parliament on Friday, paving the way for Socialist incumbent Pedro Sanchez to have another shot at cobbling together a majority – with the backing of separatist parties whose support could cost him dearly.
Two months after an inconclusive general election resulted in a hung parliament, Spain’s protracted political horse-trading has delivered a first, highly expected verdict: there will be no conservative government led by Alberto Nunez-Feijoo – at least not in this legislature.
On Friday, the leader of the right-wing Popular Party (PP) conceded defeat in his second attempt to win the backing of Spain’s Congress of Deputies, the lower house of parliament, falling short of the 176 seats required for a majority.
Feijoo’s failure stems from his controversial alliance with the far-right Vox party, which has effectively alienated all other parties. It sets in motion a two-month countdown to new elections, the country’s sixth in eight years.
That is, unless the country’s interim leader Pedro Sanchez succeeds in his own attempt to reach the 176-seat threshold over the coming weeks.
Sanchez, 51, came second in the July 23 vote, his Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) trailing the PP by a narrower-than-expected 1.4 percentage points. Sometime next week, King Felipe VI is expected to task him with forming a government, although the date for a new investiture vote has yet to be set.
“The Socialists are likely to aim for a vote during the week of October 10-16,” said Barbara Loyer, a professor and Spain expert at Paris-8 University. “The investiture must take place before November 27, barring which Spanish voters will head back to the polls on January 14.”
After repeated elections, political instability and the complexities of coalition-building have become recurrent topics of discussion in the EU’s fourth-largest economy.
“It’s all you hear about – in the press, on television or from people on the street,” said Jean-Marc Sanchez, a French-Spanish lawyer and keen observer of Spanish politics, speaking from Barcelona – where Catalan separatists hold the keys to power in Madrid.
The fragmented parliament resulting from the July 23 election has left Sanchez and his left-wing allies 24 seats short of a majority, meaning the Socialist leader needs the support of all but one of the 25 lawmakers representing Catalan and Basque nationalist parties.
“Sanchez is in a delicate position: he needs the support of all separatist parties since he is a long shot from having a majority alone,” said Maria Elisa Alonso, a political analyst at the University of Lorraine in eastern France who specialises in Spanish politics.
The PSOE leader, who has a track record of brokering compromise and holding together unwieldy alliances, can point to a recent precedent to bolster his case.
On August 17, his candidate for parliament speaker Francina Armengol garnered the support of 178 lawmakers in the lower-house Congress. They included seven MPs from United for Catalonia (JxCat), representing the most hardline separatists in Catalan politics.
JxCat’s figurehead is none other than Carles Puigdemont, the exiled leader of a botched Catalan independence drive in 2017 that has poisoned Spanish politics ever since.
Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium to avoid prosecution over his illegal independence referendum, has made his support conditional on Sanchez granting an amnesty and “an end to all legal proceedings” against Catalan separatists. Meanwhile, the left-wing ERC, another Catalan separatist party, has asked for a new referendum on self-determination – a legal one, this time – in exchange for its backing.
“ERC leaders who were convicted over the 2017 independence bid have already been pardoned (by Sanchez) and released, whereas the JxCat fugitives have their own fate on the line,” said Loyer. “A general amnesty would wipe the slate clean for everybody.”
Such demands have prompted a barrage of protests from across the political spectrum, including from prominent members of Sanchez’s own party.
“We cannot let ourselves be blackmailed,” said Felipe Gonzalez, the former Socialist prime minister who governed Spain in the 1980s and 90s. “We told voters on July 23 that there was no room for amnesty under our Constitution,” added Emiliano Garcia-Page, PSOE’s president of the Castilla-La Mancha region south of Madrid, flagging the risk of a voter backlash.
Sanchez is now caught between two fires as he attempts to win over separatist lawmakers without alienating others in his own camp.
“He will have to convince voters and his lawmakers that the amnesty that was impossible – and unconstitutional – only a few months ago is now somehow possible,” said Alonso, stressing that Sanchez has “very little wiggle room”.
As he campaigned in the run-up to the July vote, Spain’s interim prime minister clearly stated that “amnesty is incompatible with the Constitution”. He will have to strike a more conciliatory tone if he is to sway the separatist camp – a feat he has repeatedly pulled off in the past.
“Sanchez is something of a whiz when it comes to semantic pirouettes, portraying seemingly impossible moves in a good light,” said Loyer. She noted that the Socialist leader studiously avoids the word “amnesty”, opting instead to “dejudicialise” the tussle between Barcelona and Madrid.
Since coming to power in 2018, a year after Catalonia’s failed independence push, Sanchez has sought to ease the country’s chronic separatist tensions. He has resumed talks with separatist parties, pardoned nine of their leaders, and reformed Spain’s sedition law to reduce prison sentences.
The PSOE leader has denied the reforms are a concession to secessionists, but critics on the right have blasted such moves as cynical ploys to hang on to power.
“Sanchez always turns his coat the right way round, he’s the great survivor of Spanish politics,” said Jean-Marc Sanchez, the French-Spanish lawyer. “He’ll do anything to remain in power.”
With analysts pointing to a January election as the likeliest outcome, the prime minister’s latest attempt to pull off a majority in parliament could carry a high political cost. As Alonso warned, “voters may seek to punish him at the polls should he propose an amnesty” for the likes of Puigdemont.
While new elections would prolong the political impasse, Spain remains better equipped than other countries to cope with gridlock in the capital, Loyer cautioned.
“One has to bear in mind that Spain is a highly decentralised country, with autonomous regions wielding a lot of power,” she explained. “Like in Belgium, a large part of day-to-day affairs can carry on unimpeded, even when the central government is in crisis.”
This article was translated from the original in French.