by DICK NICHOLS
Supporters of left-wing political force Podemos celebrate the strong showing for their party in the December 20 general elections
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In an article that appeared in the January 24 edition of the Spanish daily El País, Pablo Iglesias, secretary-general of the radical Spanish political force Podemos, spells out his view of the kind of government the Spanish state needs after the December 20 general election produced a broadly left social majority but no clear majority coalition in the 350-seat Spanish parliament.
The governing conservative People’s Party (PP) won 123 seats and the right-populist Citizens 40. On the left, the main opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) won 90 seats, while Podemos and the three people’s unity alliances in which it participated in Catalonia, Galicia and the Valencian Community won 69. The other seats went to the United Left-Popular Unity (IU-UP), and Catalan, Basque and Canary Island nationalist forces.
Decisive for determining what sort of government Spain will get — or if it will have to go to early elections — is which way the PSOE will jump in the wheeling-and-dealing presently taking place among the parties.
Since December 20, PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez has been coming under intense pressure from the Spanish and European establishment not to come to an agreement with Podemos. However, most polling of public opinion as to preferred governmental alliance favours a PSOE-Podemos coalition, a reality the PSOE leader cannot ignore.
The PSOE’s options are limited, as no ready majority is available except for that which Podemos and IU-UP support and the elites can’t stomach — a PSOE-Podemos-IU-UP coalition made possible by support from one of the nationalist forces (most plausibly, the Basque Nationalist Party).
The PP’s proposal for a PP-PSOE-Citizens “constitutional” grand coalition is a non-starter, because it has been ruled out by a PSOE that understands only too well that it would be suicide. Moreover, for either of the two remaining combinations of governing coalition to gain the relative majority needed for investiture, other parliamentary forces would have to abstain , at the risk of antagonising their own support base.
A PSOE-Citizens coalition could not be invested without the abstention of either the PP or nearly all other forces — including Podemos and the alliances in which it participates — while a PP-Citizens coalition could not be invested without PSOE abstention.
Iglesias’s article, which justifies Podemos’ call for a “government of change”, demands that the PSOE heed the interests of the social majority as revealed in the December 20 vote. The PSOE’s response to this apparently impossible demand is outlined in the following description of events since the general election.
Seven weeks of negotiations
The most important moments in the negotiations have been as follows.
The January 13 deal between the PSOE, PP and Citizens over the parliamentary speakership panel.
The essence of this operation was to make the former socialist premier of the Basque Country Patxi López the speaker of parliament in exchange for the PP and Citizens getting a majority on the speakership panel. That majority was then used to deny the status of parliamentary group to the left regionalist alliances Together We Can (Catalonia), In Tide (Galicia) and Commitment-Podemos (Valencian Community), as well as to veto an agreement made by the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) to include the United Left-Popular Unity (IU-UP) in its group.
This act of bastardry robbed these forces of funding and parliamentary presence, and forced Podemos to offer to include them in its own group, with speaking time shared and profile for their spokespeople guaranteed.
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