At the last minute, five Basque left-wing nationalists saved the Spanish minority government from a serious defeat.

Without the votes of the small Bildu party, the emergency aid package worth 16 billion euros, which is intended to alleviate the consequences of the Ukraine war, would have failed in parliament on Thursday.

Hans Christian Roessler

Political correspondent for the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb based in Madrid.

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This would have had painful consequences for the Spaniards.

The 20 cents with which the government has been subsidizing every liter of fuel for several weeks would have been eliminated, as well as the temporary rent cap and the increase in the minimum wage.

Despite this extensive aid and the ongoing war in Ukraine, the left-wing coalition of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had to fight for a majority.

In the end there were 176 yes and 172 no votes.

As early as February, the ruling Socialists and their partners from the Podemos party were on the brink of a political abyss.

In passing the labor market reform, the deciding vote came from a Conservative MP who accidentally voted yes.

Officials and MPs spied on

"People should not pay for the government's grave mistakes," the Basque Bildu party said in reference to the Pegasus scandal.

It has been poisoning the political climate in Spain since it became known a week and a half ago that the mobile phones of more than 60 separatists had been spied on between 2017 and 2020 using software from Israel.

This was the result of a review by the Canadian research group "Citizen Lab".

Among those affected - mostly Catalans alongside several Basques - were numerous officials and MPs.

Previously, Pedro Sánchez could count on the ERC party of Catalan regional president Pere Aragonès for crucial votes, with whom he has started a political dialogue on the future of Catalonia.

But in Barcelona the outrage is so great that the 13 ERC deputies rejected the rescue package.

Aragonès, who is himself one of the Pegasus victims, is also demanding the resignation of Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles, who is responsible for the CNI secret service.

The socialist minister was the final straw for many in Barcelona when she said apologetically: "What should a state do when its constitution is violated, when someone declares independence, disrupts public order?" Previously, unnamed intelligence sources told the The newspaper "El País" emphasizes that it was only "individually, not indiscriminately and always under judicial control" that was spied on.

In addition, fewer people were affected than claimed by "Citizen Lab".

Immediately after the vote, the government tried to win back lost confidence in Catalonia.

Parliament set about setting up the Secret Service Committee, which will soon be given information about Pegasus by secret bearers.

Two more studies are to follow.

There would have been an alternative for the left-wing government on Thursday.

Instead of focusing so much on the Catalan ERC and then leaning on the Basque left-nationalists, Sánchez could have accepted the offer of the new PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

The pragmatic Galician regional president had offered him the votes of the 88 MPs from the conservative People's Party if, in return, he would improve the emergency aid package.

But the government was only willing to make minor corrections, not the tax cuts demanded by the Conservatives.

At first it was assumed that the PP parliamentary group would only abstain, but in the end they voted unanimously in the negative.