I don't know what Pedro Sánchez must be thinking every time he goes up to the lectern to talk about his contribution to the re-encounter of Catalonia with Spain. Nor what might be going through his mind when he repeats, like a scratched record, that the Spanish state has no investment deficit in Catalonia and that everything is a consequence of the pandemic or the culture of complaint that he attributes to Catalans. Even the first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, has not dared to deny the substance of this matter, although he did blame it on the People's Party, which, of course, was removed from the Spanish government through a no-confidence motion that was supported by - and whose success was dependent on - the votes of the naive pro-independence parties who thought that with Sánchez in the Moncloa palace there would be a turnaround in the Spanish government and that they too would benefit politically.
The balance, sadly, could not be more negative because the chest of tangible achievements obtained contains only the partial and reversible pardons that ERC negotiated with Sánchez and that the party refuses to publicly list as one of the assets of the negotiation for fear that a boomerang effect might occur among its voters. And, without that, there are only breaches - the audiovisual law, the budget and the non-existent execution of infrastructure investments, to name three irrefutable examples. To this can be added: the demolition job carried out by the PSOE on the dialogue table, which has left the ERC without any possible explanation to make to the public; Catalangate, which has been revealed as the largest known case of political espionage in Europe; and, as the icing on the cake, the CNI espionage of the president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, while he was actually negotiating with the Spanish prime minister.
About this particular case, if one stops to think, it would be difficult to find examples of espionage against one's political ally in order to know what his next moves will be. But Sánchez has got used to riding on his lies and something that, in other latitudes, such as Germany, would be hugely rejected ends up even winning him accolades here. It is taken for granted that a politician must be a liar and that this makes him more professional. Hearing Pedro Sánchez in the Senate on Tuesday, talking about infrastructure investments in Catalonia and the massive charade of having only invested 35.8% of the budgeted amount, while in the Community of Madrid the state spent 184% of what it said it would, one can only wonder what there is in Sánchez that enables him to tell so many lies per minute.
And this without it having any impact since in Spain they think that it is the other way around, and the hoaxes of the PP and the fake news of the Madrid right-wing press - which we can really consider to be of the extreme right - are what make an impact. The clearest example of all this will be seen in the Andalusian autonomous elections, where a PSOE without any discourse is going to be dealt an historic blow on June 19th. And the fact is that the Socialists have only the line that they are a regenerating force in Spanish politics, and they won't use this because they are currently more part of the problem than of the solution. So all that's left for Sánchez to do is lie.