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03 January 2020Spain will soon have a government: Pedro Sanchez will guide it and will be formed by the alliance between its socialists and the left-wing anti-system of Podemos by Pablo Iglesias, plus the Basque nationalists of the Pnv. The white smoke, expected after months of impasse and four early elections in four years, was allowed by the Catalan leftist independence of the ERC, whose National Council last night approved by a vast majority the abstention vote of its 13 deputies. And that will allow Sanchez to have a majority vote of confidence (which in Spain is called an "investiture"), scheduled on January 7th.

But abstention will have a political price: the recognition of the "Catalan conflict" as a "political", and no longer only as an institutional crime. Conflict which will therefore be resolved with a "bilateral negotiating table", which does not provide for "vetoes" on any proposal, as it is written in black and white in the Erc-Psoe agreement, of which the newspaper El Pais anticipated the text. Therefore, it is presumed, even a possible re-proposal of the "referendum on self-determination" of Catalonia, after that unilaterally convened by the Generalitat of Barcelona and ended with a series of arrests and convictions, including that of the ERC leader, Oriol Junqueras. The Catalan republicans have asked that the table have as conditions that the negotiation is between 'governments', has no foreclosures or taboo arguments and instead has a calendar of work.

Concessions not just snatched from the socialists of Sanchez, who in the campaign for the political elections in November had flaunted intransigence towards Catalan independence, which became the main obstacle to a pre-election agreement with Podemos, conducive to political openness. A price that Sanchez will be called to answer politically by the opposition: from the Partido popular (Pp), proponent of the 'justicialist' intransigence, from the centrists of Ciudadanos, not to mention Vox's ultra-right, which owes much of its 52 seats in Congress, the lower house of the Spanish parliament, in its total opposition to any disunity in Spain.

The country is now starting to have, for the first time in the post-Franco democratic era, a government decidedly shifted to the left, to form which the seats of the Socialists and Podemos alone were not enough, which amount to 155 out of 350 deputies. The 13 abstentions of the ERC and the 7 of the Pnv are still not enough for the majority of 176 required to pass the first vote of confidence, scheduled for the weekend. But the second is expected to pass, the day after Epiphany, in which a simple majority will be required.