It is rare for Spanish political arithmetic to produce a circumstance like the current one, in which the parties holding the majority in the Congress and the Senate are different. In the primary Spanish legislative chamber there is a large majority that facilitated the investiture of a government of the Socialists (PSOE) and left-wing Sumar; in the upper house, on the other hand, an absolute majority of the People's Party (PP), with the ability to obstruct - not overturn - legislative initiatives, thus delaying their final approval. It is the perfect cocktail in a political situation like the present one, where the PSOE and the PP are the protagonists of an inevitable collision of institutions. The former are hostages to their political agreements and have had to make a virtue of necessity and pass an amnesty law that they did not want, but needed to continue in power. The latter have erected all kinds of obstacles to make the legislative transit of the law as complicated as possible.
And in this head-on confrontation, anything goes, as we are seeing. Thus, arguing that the amnesty law is a covert reform of the Constitution, the PP is presenting the situation as a conflict between constitutional bodies in defence of the constitutional powers of the Senate. What does this mean? Well, according to the conservatives, Congress has taken on powers that do not belong to it and has carried out a fraudulent legislative process. This move by Feijóo does not stop the Senate hearing of the law, but it links with the position of the upper chamber's lawyers and will end up forcing a pronouncement by the Constitutional Court. One key background aspect of all the machinations orchestrated by the PP is the maintenance of a political and social tension, since, legislatively speaking, the timings are already laid down, and before the summer the law will have returned to Congress, it will have its final vote of approval and will have been published in Spain's official gazette, unless a circumstance unimaginable today were to occur.
The best way to keep the debate away from the commissions received by Ayuso's partner is to talk about the corruption of the PSOE, the amnesty and the demands of the Catalan independentists
In their race towards this institutional collision, the PP are preparing a veritable minefield and, moreover, they have preferred to find a bottom-draw hiding place for the report of the Venice Commission, a Council of Europe advisory body, which, without making binding conclusions, has set out a discourse on the merits of amnesties, their legality and the impossibility of them being passed by one parliament and subsequently repealed by another. There is no way back on this, no matter how much the PP insists on saying the opposite; quite another thing is to keep repeating something that you know you can't do, but which serves to permanently mobilize your parish. Because gestures in politics also have their effect and the best way to keep the debate away from the commissions received by Ayuso's partner is to talk about the corruption of the PSOE, the amnesty and the demands of the Catalan independentists.
When the amnesty legislation's long and winding road is explained in the future, we will have to be very generous to forget the obstacles put in its way by the Spanish right. In 2017, the right was unable to open channels of dialogue that did not lead to the authoritarian suppression of Catalan autonomy and the imprisonment and exile of members of Catalonia's government and pro-independence organizations. And today, seven years later, they continue to maintain a diehard position with the sole aim of reaping electoral benefits. While this is their public discourse, the PP opens avenues of dialogue with pro-independence leaders and acknowledges, very quietly, that they have indeed spoken to them. In the end, everyone knows that if Feijóo one day forms a government, what might happen is an incognito. What today is a public crusade of opposition, may end up being a means of salvation. Stranger things have been seen in politics.