Will Pedro Sánchez’ gamble on a controversial Catalan amnesty pay off?

Spain’s acting prime minister, the Socialist Pedro Sánchez, is poised to form a new government in the next few days as a result of the riskiest political ploy the country has seen for decades.

Having led a left-wing coalition which has weathered Covid, sporadic infighting and a ferocious right-wing opposition, many expected the early election he called for last July to be the final gamble of what has been an incident-packed tenure.

His Socialists lost the election. But the victor, the conservative Popular Party (PP), was left isolated due to its hostility to Catalan and Basque nationalism, and only the far-right Vox, of the main parties, backed its bid for power. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo was a handful of seats short of being able to form a right-wing coalition when he lost an investiture vote in September.

Next it is Sánchez’s turn, and he appears to have enough parliamentary support to form a new coalition administration by a narrow margin. He has needed to secure the backing of Together for Catalonia (JxCat), the party of the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who has been in self-imposed exile in Belgium since 2017, beyond the reach of the Spanish judiciary which has been pursuing him for his role in his region’s failed independence bid.

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In exchange for their votes Puigdemont and the other main nationalist party, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), have demanded an amnesty for independence leaders and activists who still face legal action linked to the secession attempt of six years ago. After weeks of talks JxCat and ERC Sánchez’ Socialists have agreed on the content of the bill.

Sánchez has made substantial concessions to the independence movement in the past, including issuing pardons for nine jailed politicians in 2021. His government also reformed the criminal code to eliminate the crime of sedition and modify the crime of misuse of public funds, in theory benefiting Catalan leaders who were facing those charges.

Those measures ensured the ongoing parliamentary support of ERC, allowing Sánchez to remain in power. He argued, correctly, that they also helped calm the tensions in Catalonia generated in great part by the mulish unionism of the PP, which had governed before him and had shown itself woefully incapable of managing the territorial problem. With independence leaders no longer in prison and the antiquated crime of sedition no longer in existence, nationalist claims that Spain was repressive and out of step with modern Europe were undermined.

An amnesty, however, is a much bigger undertaking. It is expected to affect several hundred Catalan nationalists. It also raises the prospect of Puigdemont, who has been an uncompromising critic of Spanish democracy over the last half decade, returning to Spain without being troubled by the judiciary and once again being able to run for office.

The irony of this is that Puigdemont’s JxCat party lost ground in July’s election. Lack of support for his hardline approach to the independence issue had appeared to relegate the former regional leader to irrelevance. Yet Spain’s political future now depends on him.

This odd dynamic is a result of the fragmentation of Spain’s political landscape over the last decade as new parties have emerged, making the formation of governments much more difficult.

Sánchez, who has battled the odds to remain in office since 2018, faced severe criticism over his pardons and criminal code modifications. He now faces an even fiercer backlash. The PP and Vox have warned that introducing this amnesty is unconstitutional and risks discrediting the revered 1978 magna carta. They also claim it is a “surrender” to nationalism, and that the next concession wrung from Sánchez will be a Scotland-style independence referendum (something he has ruled out). Both right-wing parties have a habit of cynically using the territorial issue as a political weapon and much of the criticism has been histrionic, such as labelling Sánchez a “dictator” or “coup-monger”. However, on this occasion his initiative is also causing unease within the ranks of his own Socialist Party, particularly among some veterans.

There is no clear consensus on whether the amnesty fits within the bounds of the constitution or not. What is beyond doubt, however, is that having refused to countenance such a measure in the past, the ever-pragmatic Sánchez has performed yet another of the pivots which have characterised his tenure, this time pushing his ambition to remain in office as far as is democratically possible.

The Socialist leader’s insistence that the amnesty is driven by a desire to improve further the political climate in Catalonia, or promote “co-existence”, as he puts it, is not entirely convincing. Moreover, his reliance on the populist Puigdemont suggests this will be an extremely fragile, antagonistic legislature, with pro-independence parties agitating for a referendum and the right weaponising the situation in an effort to destabilise Sánchez.

Yet the likely alternative scenario to the amnesty and a new left-wing government is even more troublesome: a repeat election in January in which, many polls suggest, the right could secure a majority, leading to a PP-Vox coalition government. In recent months those two parties have formed dozens of alliances in regions and town halls across the country. In many cases the far-right has imposed its extremist values on the conservatives, persuading them to eliminate local gender equality departments, roll back historical memory legislation and, in the town of Santa Cruz de Bezana, in Cantabria, cancel the projection of the Disney film Lightyear because it shows two female characters kissing.

The prospect of the far right entering the national government with such regressive ideas and its red-meat unionism should make moderate Spaniards blanch. They may have to accept that however self-serving Sánchez’ motives for introducing the amnesty, it could be the best solution available for Spain.

Guy Hedgecoe is a journalist based in Madrid