Despite the fact that it was a decisive day for the Government, Pedro Sánchez this Thursday allowed his main collaborators, with Félix Bolaños at the helm, to publicly show the euphoria that dominates the president’s team after the amnesty agreement that paves the way Furthermore, to the Budgets. Sánchez has concentrated on his trip to Brazil, which he considers very important from an economic point of view – Spanish companies here aspire to a part of the pie of 300,000 million in public works that the Lula Government is launching – and has not wanted to show the public their joy at the agreement. But privately, several of his collaborators point out that he is as euphoric as everyone else.
The president, those around him point out, considers that this agreement not only consolidates the legislature and paves the way for the Budgets, which will not take long to arrive, according to La Moncloa’s calculations, but that it also represents something much more fundamental, because implies the definitive closing of the political wound opened in 2017 by the process. Far from being on the defensive with the amnesty, as it seemed in the first months, Sánchez has given the order to turn this issue around and claim it as a very positive measure. For this reason, Bolaños said that the Government is “proud” of the amnesty, something that seemed unthinkable a few months ago, when Sánchez justified it by saying that we had to “make a virtue of necessity.”
Sánchez and his team had been working on the agreement for weeks, but everything has accelerated much more after the dismal result of the PSOE in the Galician elections and the dimensions that the scandal of the Koldo case led the Government to one of its moments of greatest weakness since the leader of the PSOE arrived at La Moncloa in 2018. If the amnesty was always the key to the legislature, in recent days it had become the only solution to get out of the political hole into which the Government had gotten itself with the first case of corruption that affects the Sánchez Executive.
Those around the president are convinced that this agreement strengthens the Government. And above all, when the Budgets also arrive in a few weeks, they believe that they will leave the opposition out of the game in their attempt to install the idea that the Executive is about to fall. The most important political message that comes out of this agreement, at least as seen by the president’s closest team, is that there is a long term ahead and the Koldo case, Although no one underestimates its seriousness, it will not be able to overthrow the Government. “That’s what makes the right desperate. They thought this was over, but they are going to have a few more years of Sanchismo,” they point out in the leader’s circle.
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The priority now is to move the Budgets forward. The negotiation is very advanced, and has been carried out in parallel with that of the amnesty. The meetings led by María Jesús Montero, Minister of Finance, have not been interrupted at any time. She doesn’t want to set dates, she just says that she wants to get them out “as soon as possible.” But the truth is that the Government has kept all the machinery in motion because it assumed that the amnesty agreement would arrive at some point.
There has been a lot of negotiation with all the groups, although no one wants to consider it closed and everyone will try to charge dearly for their support. But the underlying political decision that both Junts and ERC have made, and that both the PNV and Bildu are also clear about, is to maintain the compact majority and allow the Government to develop its political project through the Budgets, according to sources. from all sectors.
In the conversation on the plane on the way to Brazil, Sánchez already made it clear that he was not going to wait to release the 2025 Budgets, he is working to have the 2024 Budgets as soon as possible, which are already three months late. Government sources indicate that it will not be as imminent as some point out, it is not a matter of one or two weeks, but it has been seen in all the conversations for the amnesty agreement and in others that all the majority groups, including Junts , have the clear will to agree on the Budgets.
But beyond the political situation, very relevant for Sánchez at a time of extreme weakness due to the Koldo case and the fiasco in Galicia, those around the president believe that the amnesty will have substantive and long-term political consequences that can only be seen over time. Seven years later, the president’s team is convinced that they are putting an end to the process and thus opening a new stage in Spanish politics. And they believe that the PP is making a mistake by not understanding that this is the process desired not only by the majority of Catalan society, but also by a good part of Spanish society, that when it sees the results of this decision it will end up agreeing with the Government.
moments of anguish
At least that’s how they see it in Sánchez’s team, where moments of real anguish have been experienced in the last two weeks, especially with the resistance of José Luis Ábalos to hand over the minutes due to his political responsibility in the Koldo case. The wear and tear of this corruption scandal is not appeased by this pact, and Sánchez himself admitted on the plane that “it is not the best scenario” to have this case on the table with several elections on the horizon, but at La Moncloa they trust May this amnesty agreement and the subsequent Budget agreement change the political panorama a little and above all definitively establish the idea that there is a legislature for a while. For Sánchez, this idea is fundamental, because the opposition seems to be betting everything on the permanent feeling that the Government is about to fall. Once again, when he was at a moment of maximum weakness, Sánchez has achieved a turn of events that allows him to once again offer a message of resistance and give a horizon of continuity to his policies.
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