Pedro Sánchez is on the verge of winning congressional backing for a second term as Spain’s prime minister after securing the support of Catalan separatist parties by agreeing to a controversial amnesty for hundreds of people involved in the failed push for regional independence six years ago.
Wednesday’s investiture debate – which will be followed by a vote on Thursday that the socialist leader already has the numbers to win – is expected to bring an end to months of political deadlock following July’s inconclusive snap general election.
Although the conservative People’s party (PP) narrowly defeated Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), it has proved unable to form a government, even with the backing of the far-right Vox party and other, smaller groupings.
The PSOE and its partners in the leftwing Sumar coalition have managed to secure the necessary votes by enlisting the support of Catalan and Basque nationalists and other regional parties.
Negotiations, however, have not been cheap or easy. Catalonia’s two main pro-independence parties – the pragmatic Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and the more hardline Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) – only agreed to back Sánchez after he accepted their demands for an amnesty.
According to the draft law tabled by the PSOE on Monday, the amnesty would apply to hundreds of people, including Junts’s leader, the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who fled Spain to avoid arrest over his role in masterminding the failed secession attempt in October 2017.
Sánchez argues that the amnesty will help heal the wounds of the past and promote peaceful coexistence.
But the amnesty law has infuriated the PP and Vox, which have accused the acting prime minister of debasing democracy and using the amnesty as a cynical ploy to remain in power.
The two parties – which have long attacked the socialist leader for his reliance on Catalan and Basque nationalists – have also pointed out that Sánchez explicitly ruled out an amnesty before the general election on the grounds that it was not compatible with the constitution.
A recent poll suggested that 70% of Spanish voters are also against the amnesty law, and huge demonstrations against the move were held across Spain last Sunday.
Recent days have also seen Vox politicians attend protests outside the PSOE’s headquarters in Madrid that have ended in skirmishes between police and fascist and neo-fascist groups.
On Tuesday, the PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said Spain was facing “an unprecedented situation” and called on the EU to weigh in on the amnesty law.
Another senior PP figure likened the amnesty to the kind of legislation introduced during the Franco dictatorship, while Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the populist PP president of the Madrid region, said Sánchez had finally revealed his “totalitarian” project and “ushered in a dictatorship through the back door”.
Sources in the acting government have brushed off such suggestions as apocalyptic nonsense and say they serve only to show how closely the PP has come to resemble its rivals on the far right.
Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, has described Sánchez’s deal with the Catalan parties as “a coup d’état in capital letters” and said it was the “most delicate moment in Spanish politics in the past 40 years”.
He has also called for a “permanent and peaceful mobilisation” that went far beyond Sunday’s one-off demonstrations.
Sources within Sánchez’s caretaker administration claim the amnesty law is perfectly in keeping with the Socialist-led government’s efforts to calm tensions and find a political solution to the so-called Catalan question.
While repeatedly ruling out a referendum on Catalan self-determination, Sánchez has exhibited a markedly conciliatory approach to the issue and two years ago pardoned nine Catalan independence leaders for their roles in the bid to split from Spain.
Sánchez himself has urged the PP to show “good sense” and to stop trying to stir things up.
“I ask them to respect the result at the ballot box and the legitimacy of the government we will soon form,” he said on Saturday.
“I ask them to be brave and to say no to the bear-hug of the far right, and to abandon the reactionary path that they’re currently following towards the abyss. We will govern for all Spaniards – for four more years of social progress and coexistence.”
