Josep Borrell is a solitary politician: never committed to playing a team game since the very start of his political career. Pedro Sánchez, astute, recalled him after winning his no-confidence vote against Mariano Rajoy. He put the stamp of Spanish nationalism on a government which, due to the pact made with the Catalan pro-independence parties, an agreement to support Sánchez in exchange for nothing, was facing a suspicious reception from the Madrid establishment: the media, the judiciary and the financial world. Six months later, the financial community have the measure of the government, the media, partially so, and, with respect to the judiciary, Sánchez has found that his progress is limited, because it is an absolute preserve of the right. The government? Well, there's an astronaut, a judge, a prosecutor, territorial barons... Borrell has fulfilled his role of contention for the most traditional strand of Socialist support and Sánchez thinks he no longer needs him.
This is what is behind the intensity of the revelation that Sánchez wants to send him to Europe as a candidate for the elections to the European Parliament next May. Borrell has already spent time in Brussels. In fact, he was even president of the Parliament. You could say he already has it in his CV. For this reason he has something between very little and zero interest in repeating his role as an MEP. Sánchez even went as far as to raise the option of the mayoralty of Madrid, an idea that provoked greater resistance.
It will be interesting to see the level of resistance from Borrell and the persuasiveness of Sánchez, who will do battle over the next few weeks. Especially because Borrell is his own man. No one else's. In any case, the most important thing is that he is no longer a necessary asset for the Spanish government. Only the support given him by the Popular Party and Ciudadanos due to his anti-independence profile has spared him from parliamentary reproach over the insider trading scandal related to the multinational Abengoa, of which he was a board member. The PP and Cs both protected him as if he were one of their own (in fact, where it matters, he is).
It remains to be seen how much opposition Borrell will put up to a new golden retirement in Brussels when what really excites him is dismantling Catalan government structures abroad and using the Spanish foreign ministry as the base for an international crusade against the Catalan independence movement.