Sánchez uses scare tactics

The three right-wing parties’ ambitions to fill Madrid’s Plaza de Colon and evict the government from La Moncloa were thwarted on Sunday when under 50,000 responded to their call to protest. But as Pedro Sánchez took his first breath of relief he began discussing moving general elections forward to April 14 (the anniversary of the Second Republic proclaimed in 1931) to scare the independence movement, as this would mean that the aftermath of the trial could be handled by a coalition of PP, Cs and Vox. This was Sánchez’s last attempt to get ERC and PDeCAT to withdraw their conditions for agreeing to his budget by tomorrow, however, Quim Torra and ERC did not soften, and urged Sánchez to get back to the negotiations open to the right to self-determination that Torra said had been broken by the government.

According to information published by the Spanish news agency EFE, in which sources from Moncloa are cited, Sanchez is looking at bringing the general elections forward to before Sunday May 26 (the current date for municipal, autonomous and European elections) and is considering 14 April instead. For this to be feasible Sánchez’s 2019 budgets would have to be completely discarded in Congress tomorrow and Sánchez would have to dissolve the Cortes by Tuesday 19 February.Torra showed he was not about to slacken or give in to pressures or fears about the potential arrival of the right on April 14, and stuck to his three conditions for agreeing to not veto Sánchez’s budget: “The concretion of the international rapporteur, the right to self-determination and the end of repression”.