Pedro Sánchez wins second term as Spain’s PM after Catalan amnesty deal

Pedro Sánchez has clinched a second term as Spain’s prime minister after winning an ill-tempered investiture vote that was dominated by his decision to secure the support of Catalan separatists by offering a controversial amnesty to those involved in the failed push for regional independence six years ago.

The vote on Thursday came almost four months after an inconclusive snap election in July in which Sánchez’s governing Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) was narrowly defeated by its conservative rivals in the People’s party (PP).

Sánchez won an absolute majority in the investiture vote, securing the support of 179 of Spain’s 350 MPs. But his victory has come at a high price and has depended on the backing of smaller regional parties, including Catalan and Basque nationalists.

Despite finishing first in July’s election, the PP proved unable to form a government with the support of the far-right Vox party and other smaller groupings.

Sánchez and his partners in the leftwing Sumar alliance, however, managed to cobble together the necessary backing for their coalition by acceding to the amnesty demands of the two main Catalan pro-independence parties – the pragmatic Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and the hardline Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia).

Sánchez’s manoeuvring – and the fact that he had ruled out an amnesty during the election campaign – has prompted anger from the PP and Vox, which have accused him of hypocrisy, caving into the separatists and putting self-preservation before the national interest.

The PP has called on the EU to weigh in on the proposed law, while Vox has suggested the acting prime minister is perpetrating “a coup d’état in capital letters”. The deeply divisive issue has also led to large demonstrations across Spain and angry and violent clashes between police and fascists and neo-fascists outside the PSOE’s Madrid headquarters.

Sánchez argues that the amnesty will allow the country to turn the page on the past. “In the name of Spain and its interests and in the defence of coexistence between Spaniards, we’re going to grant an amnesty to those people who are facing legal action over the [Catalan independence] process,” he told MPs on Wednesday, as the investiture debate began.

“This amnesty will benefit many people, political leaders whose ideas I do not share and whose actions I reject, but also hundreds of citizens who were swept up in the process.”

The move, he added, was not the attack on the Spanish constitution that his opponents had claimed, but rather “a demonstration of its strength”.

But PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said on Thursday that “the democratic warning lights” were flashing now that Sánchez had yielded to the independence movement.

“We’ll try to work for our country and to recover the sanity that the personal ambition of the man who is now prime minister had led down a blind alley,” he said.

A day earlier, Feijóo had launched a scathing attack on Sánchez for agreeing to an amnesty that would include Carles Puigdemont, the Junts leader and self-exiled former Catalan regional president who was the architect of the 2017 bid to secede and who fled to Belgium to avoid arrest in its aftermath.

“You are the problem,” he said. “You and your inability to keep your word, your lack of moral limits, your pathological ambition. As long as you’re around, Spain will be condemned to division. Your time as prime minister will be marked by Puigdemont returning freely to Catalonia. History will have no amnesty for you.”

Following the vote, Vox called for the PP’s cooperation in fighting what it called Sánchez’s “coup”, saying the PSOE leader had become a “despot”.

Not all the admonishments have come from Sánchez’s opponents. Junts, perhaps annoyed by the acting prime minister’s mention of a “united Spain”, advised him “not to tempt fate”, warning that its support for his minority coalition government was conditional and would be offered on a case-by-case basis.

“If we are here today it is to make things really change,” Junts’s spokesperson, Míriam Nogueras, said on Wednesday. “But if there is no progress, we will not approve any initiative presented by your government. It is linked to progress and compliance with agreements.”

The draft amnesty bill, which was tabled by the PSOE on Monday, covers the period from 1 January 2012 to 13 November 2023, so its scope includes the symbolic, consultative independence referendum of November 2014 and the one that came three years later and was followed by a unilateral declaration of regional independence.

Its beneficiaries include 309 people who face criminal lawsuits and 73 police officers who face criminal action over their conduct on the days before and after the second referendum.

Although the amnesty will allow Puigdemont to return to Spain and some of his former colleagues to have their bans on holding public office lifted, the socialists have sought to stress that the act of clemency is more general. They say it is designed to apply to the headteachers who have faced legal action for allowing their schools to be used as referendum polling stations, and to civil servants, firefighters and police officers.