The disagreement between the Socialists (PSOE) and Together for Catalonia (Junts) on the decree laws that the Spanish government seeks to validate in the Congress of Deputies this Wednesday is proving to be a real stress test for both parties. For the Socialists, because they are not softening on their plan to use this parliamentary route, even at the cost of passing the measures with support from the opposition People's Party (PP). And they refuse to convert them into normal bills that would then follow a full parliamentary procedure with all groups able to present amendments and vote on them. In the case of Junts, the opposition to giving a favourable vote arises from the fact that one of the decrees modifies the law on civil justice procedure in such a way that it would allow the Spanish judiciary to put the Catalan amnesty law on standby until the European Court of Justice was able to rule on any preliminary legal issues that might be raised.
Although it seems like a technical issue, it is mostly political, related to the mutual trust between the two parties. That it is political is obvious, since it could as far as yielding a situation in which, although the amnesty law still existed, those who stood to benefit from it were at the mercy of a long and perhaps even uncertain calendar. But above all, it provides a basis for argument, and from there other factors enter, such as mistrust and suspicion. That's where the real obstacle is in starting the legislature: unless each side can assume that their credit is guaranteed by the other, disagreements have an almost impossible solution. Junts considers itself to have been duped because no one told the independentists that the amnesty had to travel to Brussels. The Socialists reply that it is a European demand, an irreversible one, and that there is little they can do about it, since, in the meantime, important EU aid is at stake. The summary would be that Sánchez would fulfill the pact and there would be an amnesty law, but, at the same time, everything would remain in the air: not directly through the law, but the effect would be the same.
The legislature has started in the worst possible way; a defeat for Sánchez would be as if, at the first cough, he had been hooked up to the respirator
Reconciliation is, therefore, impossible, since one of the two must appear before public opinion as having been made to eat humble pie, which is worse than impossible to digest when you have all the cameras and the rest of the parties watching you. And in the background there is a third underlying factor which is of some importance, since the devil is also in the details. Although with Santos Cerdán, the PSOE negotiator in the relationship, things do not seem to be going badly, the opposite is true with the justice and presidency minister, Félix Bolaños, with whom a problem has been lingering since summer. In this context of votes that have slipped out of the PSOE's hands at the moment, there are also those of the five parliamentarians of Podemos, who are equally essential for Pedro Sánchez's arithmetic to work out.
Everyone knew that this would be a difficult legislature, but the truth is that it has started in the worst possible way. A defeat for Sánchez would be as if, at the first cough, he had been hooked up to the respirator. This is also why the PP refuses to listen to the siren songs that the government is playing them. On the right they obviously like the fact that the amnesty is much more difficult and depends on European precedents. But it is more likely that the PSOE will suffer a parliamentary setback and end up confirming that this is a fragile government, unable to carry forward any parliamentary initiative. To all this we must add that Alberto Núñez Feijóo only has as much autonomy in the Spanish capital as the extreme right will grant him, and any support for the Socialists could cost him his head. Because if Carles Puigdemont is an undisputed enemy of the Spanish state, Pedro Sánchez runs a similar gauntlet for all of the deep state that is present making moves behind the curtains.