The saying goes that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. And it can be applied to the Canarian Coalition (CC), which for a few hours tried to play a hand for which it held no cards even though its ambition was lofty. After the only MP the party has in the Congress of Deputies voted in favour of the failed investiture of the People's Party (PP) candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, this Thursday the party asserted that it had a winning strategy: if it voted in favour of Pedro Sánchez's investiture it would benefit the Canary Islands - so far nothing objectionable, that's what votes are for - and it would also undermine the strength of Together for Catalonia (Junts) since the party could thus abstain, no longer needing to vote affirmatively for Sánchez for him to become prime minister.
This dodge by the Canary Islands party was there one moment and gone the next, because the response of Carles Puigdemont's group was immediate: Junts will not abstain under any circumstances if Sánchez ends up presenting himself for an investiture. Their vote will be affirmative or negative, never abstention. In a flash, it all goes back to square one and the value of the Canarian vote dropped to junk bond level. The politics of inventions or last-minute improvisations has these things. A big cloud of smoke that makes everyone look at the fire but there is very little in the heart of it. And, in this case, a few headlines first thing in the morning that were a veritable flash in the pan.
In the timetable drawn up for the investiture of the acting prime minister, which Sánchez has tried, on at least two occasions, to shorten, this Thursday was the day when the current tenant of the government palace admitted that he is now negotiating with the parliamentary groups over the amnesty for those involved in the various judicial cases related to the repression of the Catalan referendum of October 1st and the beginning of all the persecution derived from Operation Catalonia, which dates from 2012. He is to meet all of them, with the exception of Vox, now that Felipe VI has officially instructed him to seek the necessary support to present his candidacy to the Congress of Deputies. El País, the main newspaper of the Spanish left in general, appeared this Thursday with a headline that was not drafted with any innocence at all, the largest lettering on the front page, which read: "22 Constitutional Court rulings allow an amnesty to be granted". And a subtitle along the same lines: "The decisions of the court of guarantees and more than thirty international treaties have recognized the validity of such a measure of grace." The story was signed by Xavier Vidal-Folch, who, if we can say it without excessive irony, must have really forced himself to go through with it...
It is no small thing that the reference newspaper for the Socialists has made an about-turn of this magnitude when just weeks ago it said that the amnesty was impossible and you can find all the headlines that testify to that. Well, now the wind is blowing the other way because an unforeseen and unthinkable election result on July 23rd altered all the plans that were in place until now and opened up scenarios that had to be adopted because there was no other choice. Because how were they to know that the game tokens they would pick up were to have Puigdemont's name on them? In this scenario, no matter how much the fire is stoked by the Spanish right in an attempt to derail the investiture, it will end up doing very little harm. Sánchez and Puigdemont, having overcome their fears and got used to going to the limit of their options, know that if they fall it is because the agreement was not possible or one of the two made a mistake. The right, no matter how much of a spectacle it puts on, is, if events follow the normal means, a very secondary actor, almost irrelevant to the investiture. Another matter would be if the path it decided to take were outside the normally predictable variables.