The outcome of the general elections on Sunday in Spain left a surprising paradox.
The parties that lost to their direct rival or obtained fewer votes than four years ago were the ones that celebrated the results the most.
The conservative PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo won the elections with 136 deputies against 122 from the second most voted party, the progressive PSOE of President Pedro Sánchez.
Sánchez celebrated in style that the right-wing bloc will not reach the necessary number of deputies to govern, which opens a door for him to continue governing despite being in second place.
But to reissue the current coalition executive, Sánchez will depend on the pro-independence parties of Cataloniawhose highest aspiration is for this northeastern region of more than 7.5 million inhabitants to separate from Spain and form an independent State.
Junts Per Catalunya and ERC, which together lost almost half their seats and more than a third of the votes compared to the 2019 elections, also celebrated the results because they can put a high price on the table in exchange for his support for Sánchez.
Both – and especially one of the two – may hold the key to the next government. We tell you why.
why is this happening
The general elections this Sunday have made it clear, once again, that forming a government in Spain is not an easy task.
Voters do not choose the president directly, but rather the 350 deputies that make up Parliament, according to the country’s electoral system.
These deputies have the mission, after the elections, of appointing the next head of government from among each of the candidates who run, it being usual for the first to be the winner and, if he does not achieve sufficient support, it is the turn of the main opposition candidate.
To invest the president, there can be two votes: the first requires an absolute majority, with the support of 176 of the parliamentarians out of the total of 350, and, if this does not go ahead, it is enough that in the second there are more votes in favor than against.
What seems simple turns into a headache because the Spanish chose a highly fragmented Parliament with left, right, regionalist and pro-independence parties that in many cases they pursue incompatible objectives and vetoes are imposed on each other.
Thus, when Núñez Feijóo runs as a candidate, needing the support of the ultra-right party Vox (between the two they only have 169 seats) it is most likely that almost all the remaining parties will veto it, as they have advancedand cannot form a government.
high demands
Then it would be Sánchez’s turn, who wouldn’t have it easy either.
The Socialists would need to reissue the pact that the government gave them in the last four years and that allows them to co-govern with Podemos, the extreme left party integrated with other similar forces in the platform now called Sumar and with which it accumulates a total of 153 deputies.
In order to move the government forward, they would have to once again secure the support of left-wing Basque independentists (Bildu), right-wing Basque regionalists (PNV), Galician nationalists (BNG) and the left-wing Catalan independentists of ERC.
and shall also achieve the favorable vote of the Catalan right-wing independentistas Juntswho have been more radical in their secessionist aspirations and did not support him in the 2019 inauguration.
Before the elections on Sunday, this party flatly refused to agree with any of the two great coalitions of the right or the left in Madrid.
However, after learning that his 7 deputies could be decisive, he put on the table the two conditions that he requires to allow the formation of a government: amnesty and self-determination.
The leader of Together, Carles Puigdemont, has been a fugitive in Belgium for almost six years to evade Spanish justice.
He is accused of rebellion and embezzlement for having organized an illegal referendum in 2017 and for having participated in the unilateral declaration of independence of Catalonia on October 1, 2017.
On Monday, the day after the elections, The Spanish Prosecutor’s Office asked the judge responsible for the case to reissue the search and arrest warrant that weighs against him.
“One day you are decisive in forming the Spanish government and the next Spain orders your arrest,” Puigdemont tweeted sarcastically on Monday.
The case that weighs against Puigdemont – and that could land him in jail if he is finally extradited to Spain – is posed as the main obstacle for Junts to allow Sánchez to govern with his partners for four more years.
“They are going to give their support to Pedro Sánchez but They are going to set a price, and this will undoubtedly be that Puigdemont comes to Spain and is released”, the renowned journalist Mariano Guindal, chronicler of the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, told BBC Mundo.
This obviously poses a problem: in Spain the judiciary is independent and it remains to be seen to what extent the pressure exerted by a party or a government on judges and prosecutors could break it in a case as serious as this.
“It’s difficult but Politics is the art of making the impossible possible.. A government can do everything: there are formulas, there are loopholes, there are changes in laws… but when a government wants to do something, it ends up doing it”.
Regarding self-determination, Junts could demand that the Spanish government allow it to hold an independence referendumthat is, a binding vote in which the Catalans decide whether or not to separate from Spain and form their own State.
This condition – counting on the party to maintain it until the end – would be practically impossible to meet for two reasons: the Spanish Constitution expressly prohibits it and the political cost of facilitating the independence of one of the most important regions of Spain would be, for the PSOE, of incalculable proportions.
However, if Junts shows some flexibility, there may be middle terms.
“Bringing in Puigdemont and letting him go would be to some extent a swallowable toad, but not the referendum. In its place, reforms or some type of popular consultation could be promoted that is not binding. Politicians have very imaginative advisers”, affirms Guindal.
In addition, ERC, the Catalan independence party that has supported the Sánchez government until now, has announced that renewing its commitment will not come free either, although it has demanded more feasible rewards: ending the Catalan fiscal deficit, transferring the commuter train network to the regional government and continuing to negotiate to achieve the referendum, according to its candidate Gabriel Rufián.
Thus, the complex network of alliances and interests of the Spanish parliamentary system makes it difficult to create a new government after the results of July 23. If this is not achieved, the elections will be repeated in October.
The power of regional nationalism
It is not the first time that the investiture of a president to form a government in Spain depends on nationalist parties.
This happened for the first time in 1996 with the Majestic Pact, named after the Barcelona hotel that housed the negotiations between the PP and Convergència i Unió (CiU) that brought the conservative José María Aznar to power.
Aznar won the elections that year without an absolute majority – and CiU gave him, along with other regionalist parties, the support he needed to form a government in exchange for political concessions.
CiU, the predecessor of Junts, was then the main nationalist party in Catalonia, did not consider itself pro-independence and aspired to achieve greater autonomy for the region.
More recent is the already mentioned example of the current government of Pedro Sánchez, who assumed the presidency in 2018 thanks to a motion of censure that had the support of the Catalan independentistas, as well as the Basque nationalists of the PNV.
Then came the 2019 elections, which were repeated after failing to reach an agreement between parties to elect president. In the second attempt, Sánchez was sworn in thanks to the abstention of ERC and the support of other minority parties.
The regionalist parties have been crucial actors in the formation of governments in Spain, and they are increasingly so in an environment marked by the division of the left and right blocks that makes an absolute majority practically impossible.
Thus, parties like Junts, with 7 deputies and the main objective of dividing a part of the country, are today crucial to form a government and avoid an endless loop of repetition of elections. A complete paradox of Spanish democracy.
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See original article on BBC