JCM

A parliamentary majority in the Spanish congress requires the support of 176 MPs. In April’s election the PSOE won 123 seats, Unidas Podemos 42. With the backing of the Basque Nationalist Party and the Catalan Republican Left, we seemed to have a working majority. On election night there was a feeling that this was going to happen — that a coalition was in the air.

Sánchez had stated during the campaign in an interview with El País that he would have no problem with Unidas Podemos members in his government. But the PSOE had never wanted a left-wing coalition — to govern with us would mean having to confront the economic powers and the European Central Bank.

If the PSOE had been serious about a coalition, it would have sat down straight after the elections and begun to negotiate in earnest. Instead they spent months delaying and insisting on discussing formulas that would have allowed them to govern alone as a minority administration.

Then a week before the vote on Sanchez’s premiership in July, the Socialists tried to detonate the talks by placing a veto on Pablo Iglesias’s presence in cabinet. In a major television interview, Sánchez claimed this was the only sticking point holding back a coalition deal.

This is something unprecedented — that you would insist the leader of your potential coalition partner cannot have a cabinet seat. When Iglesias then agreed to the veto, the PSOE was left wrong-footed. Sánchez had never expected him to accept it but only hoped to use it as a tactic to frame him and Unidas Podemos as the ones holding back talks.

The Socialists then had no choice but to sit down to negotiate the details of a coalition with us. We had already accepted the PSOE’s veto on so-called ministries of state [foreign affairs, defense, interior, and justice] as well as on the treasury. Instead we concentrated on ministries where we would be able to administer social policies in line with our electoral program — looking to secure areas such as labour, the environment, housing, etc.

The difficulty was that these negotiations did not begin until forty-eight hours before the vote. How are you meant to reach a comprehensive coalition deal in that period? During the negotiations the PSOE kept stalling over the ministries. They never made any written offers to us but orally they would suggest various positions but never together as a comprehensive package.

Then at a certain point they made a final offer which lacked any real substance. It consisted of the position of deputy prime minister but without a clear policy portfolio or budget, the ministry of health (which is a policy area run predominately at a regional level, as each autonomous community has its own health system), and then two new ministries — which had previously been sub-cabinet positions.

Unidas Podemos rejected the offer but expected the negotiations to continue through the night until right before the vote on a new government. Instead the PSOE walked away. After losing the vote in July, in which we abstained, Sánchez still had until the third week of September before new elections were called. Yet when he came back from holiday, he claimed his offer of a coalition was now “past its sell-by date” and again insisted on PSOE governing alone.