Spain is no closer to forming a working government. Acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) rejected an offer to negotiate with centre-right Partido Popular (PP) leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo in a bitchy exchange of letters made public Sunday afternoon, July 30th.
Spanish politics have been gridlocked since July 23rd when voters failed to give either the Right or the Left a clear mandate in Parliament and despite Sánchez’s socialist PSOE’s outreach to Catalan and Basque separatists to get a potential coalition over the line.
Feijóo outlined his intention to conduct “responsible dialogue” with the socialists in the hopes of forming a stable government. If successful, negotiations could prevent regional separatists from entering power with the PSOE in a move that could fatally undermine Spanish unity.
Feijóo had hoped to conduct talks on forming a coalition agreement with PSOE before August 17th when the Congress of Deputies gathers for the first time after the election but was turned down by Sánchez who expressed confidence in the press that he would be reinstated as prime minister.
Both PP and the PSOE are struggling to meet the 176 seats required to form the next Spanish government after the Right heavily underperformed despite earlier polls predicting a comfortable win for PP and the populist VOX party.
The electoral calculus was further complicated over the weekend after PSOE lost a seat in Madrid following the counting of votes belonging to Spanish expats. The loss of the Madrid seat means that Sánchez and PSOE would likely require the in-person vote of exiled Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, who is currently residing in Brussels awaiting extradition for his role in the infamous 2017 independence referendum that almost split the country.
Only earlier this month, Puigdemont faced the prospect of his extradition from Belgium after EU courts removed his immunity and that of two other Catalan MEPs. Any deal Catalan nationalists make with PSOE would require amnesty for their exiled leadership in Belgium with the current electoral carnage raising the prospect of a second Catalonia crisis and a reaction from the Right.
So far, separatists in Catalonia and the Basque region are driving a hard bargain in preliminary negotiations with the PSOE as they are offered debt relief and further regional independence in exchange for propping up another socialist administration.
A likely outcome of the current logjam is the prospect of yet another Spanish election this year as the PSOE may seek to build on their momentum—and a divided right-wing opposition—to solidify their position in Parliament.
