Cash-for-votes

The right's insistence that Pedro Sánchez and his allies are intent on breaking up Spain doesn't seem as overwrought as it once did. Sánchez won't actually destroy Spain, of course, but he is showing exceptional leniency towards Basque and Catalan pro-independence parties that together took just 6% of the vote on July 23rd. That's bound to cause conflict and resentment amongst the regions, at the very least.

Montero spoke of pardoning Catalonia's debt to the central government, not just as a one-off arrangement but as part of country-wide reform. She also promised that a returning coalition would enact these changes in "the least time possible" - although Podemos and the Socialists have already had four years to do so. What she's effectively saying is, "We're prepared to do pretty much anything these tiny parties want to secure another term in power." The PP's claim that Sánchez is determined to stay prime minister at any price (literally) now seems rather more than the jealous sniping of a party desperate for a turn in office.

Sánchez makes a big deal of the baseline which he will not cross: granting Catalans a legal referendum on independence, as David Cameron did for Scotland in 2014. But anything else goes, it seems, especially in the financial sphere. His main negotiation partner Carles Puigdemont, exiled former president of Catalonia and an uncompromising secessionist, declared on Twitter this week, "We are not here to save the kingdom of Spain but to serve Catalonia." Another leftist central government would have a hard time refuting the charge that it is also there to serve the northeastern region first, the rest of Spain second.

As one Spanish friend put it to me in a text after the election, "It pisses me off that the majority parties need to look to the little ones for support [...] They're the ones which have been least voted [for] but they have the power to decide if the PP or PSOE can govern." They not only have the power to decide who governs, it seems, but also how they govern.