Feijoo repeats his offer to Pedro Sanchez

Spain’s next government, whether Partido Popular blue or PSOE blue, needs the nationalist parties.

It’s going to be tricky enough for Pedro Sanchez who wants to repeat as president of the Spanish government.

He got there thanks to the nationalists in a no-confidence vote against Mariano Rajoy’s PP government in 2018.   He is still there after Catalans, Basques and Galicians lent him a hand and votes in 2019’s two general elections.

They helped Sanchez push through new legislation and their last huge favour – which he will have to pay for – was backing the PSOE’s candidate Francina Armengol as the new parliament’s Speaker.

If Sanchez survives an investiture, Spain will again have what the PP has derided as a Frankenstein government, a patchwork of – probably – the same parties that have assisted him in the past.

But spare a thought for the PP’s presidential candidate Alberto Nuñez Feijoo. The PP-Vox tandem have 170 seats in the national parliament between them and Feijoo can count on one more vote from the Union del Pueblo Navarro and another from Coalicion Canario.

And there it ends.

Feijoo has already been turned down by the PNV Basques and he would not in any case negotiate with EH-Bildu, which was once the political arm of the disbanded terrorist group ETA.

At one stage he even considered talking to Junts per Catalunya, the Catalan separatist party controlled from Belgium by Carles Puigdemont.

As the PP’s Institutional vice-secretary Esteban Gonzalez Pons said recently, Junts – a byblow of long-gone centre-right Convergencia i Unio – is a party “whose traditions and legality are not in doubt.”

In the end, Feijoo broke off contacts with the pro-independence party, even though a highly unlikely abstention from Junts would get him into the Moncloa Palace.

Matters were not helped when his own party objected to Feijoo’s suggestion that it was necessary to find a way of integrating Cataluña’s territorial problem.

This did not go down well with the PP in Cataluña, where party sources pointed out that Cataluña’s integration was “perfectly defined” in the Constitution.

“Strengthening the State in Cataluña, not dissolving it, is what is needed now,” the same sources argued.  “We can’t accept nationalist terms like integrate.”

PP sources later explained that Feijoo’s proposal was “nothing new” and was based on the premise that a Territorial Pact was necessary to ensure the smooth running of all the autonomous communities.

Aware that he has his work cut out for him with both nationalists and separatists, Feijoo has appealed to the PSOE’s better nature by suggesting another meeting with Pedro Sanchez to discuss a governability agreement between Spain’s two largest parties.

Feijoo announced during his September 6 visit to the Canary Islands that he would repeat his recent offer of a short two-year legislative term headed by the PP, while putting through six key State Pacts.

“But the PSOE does not want agreements with the PP.  It hasn’t wanted them anywhere in Spain,” he added, already aware of what Sanchez’s answer will be.