It could be said, not even as a joke knowing it's not a good time to make them after Barça's shameful elimination from the Champions League, that although PSC hasn't managed to bring the Spanish Senate to Barcelona, it is on the other hand poised to make its first secretary, Miquel Iceta, senate of the upper chamber. The long-standing Socialist politician, who already had an office in the Moncloa government palace (1991-95) whilst Narcís Serra was deputy prime minister, has managed to stay afloat through all the internal battles of these years within the party's ranks, and there have been more than a few of them, and secure the highest position in PSC management, which he took over in 2014. From that role, he's led the organisation with an iron fist in a silk glove. Iceta has given his support in turn to Felipe González, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, Pedro Sánchez, Susana Díaz and then Pedro Sánchez again. This shows, at the least, great ability when it comes to aligning PSC as closely as possibly with PSOE.
Iceta will be the highest-ranking official the PSC, or any other Catalan party, has ever had. With a last-minute decision, he would take the post as an autonomous-community nominated senator, in other words, being elected by the Catalan Parliament where pro-independence Junts per Catalunya, Esquerra and CUP have a majority. If the three parties vote against him he won't be elected senator and his candidacy will go off course. Talks have already started but won't bear fruit until negotiations begin, something which hasn't yet happened. In the hierarchy, after the king and his family, the speaker of the Senate is only preceded by the prime minister and the speaker of the Congress.
Although Iceta is a politician who defines himself as a federalist, a term which no one really understands, and also supported article 155, something which everyone understands perfectly, he's got a unique opportunity to show that the Senate can be something more than a chamber there to look pretty and make it a territorial chamber where the use of the official languages, for example, is absolutely natural. Although Iceta is a politician with a brazenly unionist profile, that hasn't been enough recently for PP and Cs, who have criticised him for public comments on a hypothetical future referendum in Catalonia, depending on how votes develop here. Even El Mundo wrote, when the news was announced, that Sánchez was making a gesture to the independence movement by choosing Iceta, which indicates a complete lack of understanding of the political dynamics in Catalonia.
At 58 years old, for the first time in his political career he's going to be able to play an important role in Spanish politics and show whether his repeatedly declared wish to build bridges can go anywhere. Or, as in the past, whether behind his words there is, as many have said, an intangible commitment to dialogue that never materialises in anything.