The Sanchista coalition and Pablo Iglesias' theorem

The King first commissioned the leader to attempt the investiture, who, in addition to leading the largest parliamentary group in Congress, proved in the round of consultations to have the greatest number of guaranteed supports, as many as 172.. Once the attempt failed, he issues a second order to a leader who, at this moment, can only guarantee the vote of the 121 deputies of his party, since none of those who have passed through the Zarzuela – and those who have not wanted to pass, equally necessary to give Sánchez the parliamentary majority—has taken his support for the second candidate for granted. The softest expression that has been heard from them is that “we are far” from that agreement (Yolanda Díaz).

The statement from the Royal Family that justifies this second nomination appeals to point 3 of article 99 of the Constitution, according to which, if the first proposed candidate does not obtain the confidence of the Chamber, “successive proposals will be processed.”. The head of state's reading of this text is correct, prudent and realistic, but not totally accurate.. Strictly speaking, once the obligation has been fulfilled – this is, unavoidable – to designate a first candidate, nothing formally obliges the King to formulate a second proposal if, in the course of the consultations, he verifies that there is no candidate with real possibilities of achieving the investiture. In fact, this happened on two previous occasions: after the December 2015 elections there was only one investiture session, the first failed one for Pedro Sánchez.. After April 2019, the same thing happened. Pedro Sánchez tried it once and, given the evidence that no investiture was possible, the King let the deadline run until new elections were called..

Perhaps if instead of a constitutional King as scrupulous as Felipe VI we had a president of the republic as in Italy, in the absence of guaranteed support from Pedro Sánchez, he would have granted him a deadline to negotiate and would have summoned him for when he was in a position to present itself with a real and not hypothetical majority. This King could have done the same thing and it would be constitutionally correct – even politically rational -: since you claim that you are preparing to talk to the parliamentary groups to build a majority, do it and then come back and tell me the result of your conversations. But it is certain that, in that case, a storm of lightning and thunder would have fallen on him, accusing him of sabotaging Sánchez's investiture with cunning purposes..

Thus, the King has been forced, for the second time in this legislature (as in all previous ones since his reign began) to blindly propose a candidate, risking Parliament rejecting him as it did with the first.. He does well, because the truth is that Sánchez's investiture, while not certain, is sufficiently credible to allow him to try it.. Precisely for this reason, it would have been nice to hear at least a word of gratitude from the candidate for the opportunity given to him to compose a political pact with a legion of parties with a destituent vocation and declaredly anti-monarchist, instead of the umpteenth repetition of the reproach for what that the head of the Sanchista bloc considers “a waste of time”, the attempted investiture of Feijóo. I wonder how the King should have proceeded, according to Sánchez; and, above all, I wonder how Sánchez himself—or someone of his ilk—would have proceeded occupying the head of state in a similar situation.. Someday the very long collection of disloyalties and advantageous abuses that the Spanish political leaders have inflicted on Felipe VI since he took office will be written..

With the incorporation of the xenophobic and Catalan supremacist right to the Sanchista bloc—self-proclaimed “progressive”—the theorem initially formulated by Pablo Iglesias in 2015 and which Pedro Sánchez assumed as his own to turn it into the foundation of his project, is once again confirmed and consolidated. of power to this day and onwards. The approach is based on two ideas:

a) In Spanish electoral sociology, the stable alliance of national left-wing formations with all nationalist parties with a disintegrative vocation (whatever their ideological orientation and their relationship with the constitutional order) is arithmetically unbeatable and guarantees the exercise of power for very long periods, creating a cordon sanitaire on the democratic right (for which the emergence of the extreme right is functional) and effectively blocking the alternation in power.

This requires the petrification of two blocks incommunicated and facing each other, with the blowing up of all the mechanisms of understanding or transversal coordination.. The data from the five general elections held between 2015 and 2023 (all after the end of the two-party system) confirm the solidity of this thesis:

Feijóo can now rant and claim his status as the most voted party. Under the conditions in which electoral competition has been established in Spain in recent years, the relative positions of the parties are of little relevance, because we are facing a war of bloc against bloc.. And, in that war, the coalition of the left with the extreme left and with all versions of nationalism systematically surpasses the coalition of the right. It has also happened in 2023: 12.4 million votes for the sanchista bloc compared to 11.2 million for the right-wing bloc. The victory of the PP was a mirage, which is why we all knew on the same night of July 23 that there were only two real possibilities: a Sánchez Government with its entire bloc, welcoming Puigdemont's party into it, or a repetition of elections.

b) The second axiom of Pablo Iglesias' theorem is that, in this type of alliance, the extremist and disruptive forces, even if they are a minority, impose their agenda and infect the majority central force with their ideology.. It has been proven during the last legislature: Sánchez's party has progressively become impregnated with the populist discourse of podemism and the identitatarianism of nationalisms, while its allies have barely received the effluvia of social democracy.. Three essential features of the Socialist Party prior to Sánchez were left along the way: the majority vocation, strategic autonomy and the will to structure Spain instead of dismantling it.. Not to mention the infinite legal elasticity and the extreme conjuncturality of the principles that characterizes the new creature that first leased and then commercially appropriated the old acronym.

Certainly, it is paradoxical that the triumph of Pablo Iglesias' strategic design has been accompanied by the political immolation of Iglesias himself and the destruction of the party he founded.. But history is full of cases like this.