So yes. The acting prime minister has had to descend from Mount Olympus and the Moncloa will dial the number of the Catalan government palace to speak with president Quim Torra. Pedro Sánchez will have to swallow one by one all the jokes he told not all that many weeks ago about Torra's multiple calls to him and which he boasted about neither answering, nor planning to answer. That's one of the things with Hispanic pride: you bluff, you forget about the importance of parliamentary arithmetic and your arrogance ends up blowing up in your face. Obviously, it's not been easy for the leader of PSOE to announce this step since first he had to organise a smokescreen so it would appear he wasn't giving way on his initial positions and that the call was the most normal thing in the world of the Spain of the autonomous communities.
So he's improvised, on the fly, an overly simplistic trick: telephone conversations with all the presidents of the autonomous communities to talk about his investiture in Parliament. It's never been done before, clearly, and, in any case, what there's normally been is a round of calls once the candidate for prime minister has got through the vote in the Congress. Now, to water down a call which initially was a mere courtesy, as Sánchez simply had to pick up the phone, he'll have to make 17, one to each of the presidents of an autonomous community, Torra included.
The example is an anecdote but perfectly illustrates how hard it is to get something started in official Madrid right now. If a simple phone call has needed negotiations between so many important people, how will they be able to keep making progress when they really get down to business? Spain has fallen back many years in the political negotiations and the leadership class has left the political agenda in the hands of the judges and very conservative print and audiovisual media who present themselves with the appearance of being right-wing or centre-left. You only need to have a glance at what's published there and the innumerable platforms available to retired politicians like González, Guerra, Aznar or Rodríguez Ibarra; or emerging territorial leaders like Javier Lambán from Aragon and the president of Castile-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, who, despite being very young, sometimes seem as if they come directly from the political Pleistocene.
And the thing is that neither age nor youth are a quality mark for anything. The only guarantee is professionalism, honesty, rigour and effectiveness. But for those who manage to more than demonstrate those values, today isn't a good day either.