Pedro Sánchez has for now ignored Yolanda Díaz’s request to convene a table to monitor the coalition agreement urgently to address the latest discrepancies within the Government, especially due to the president’s commitment to increase military spending. Moncloa has thus wanted to avoid giving United We Can a leading role after the first blow at the table given by the second vice president since she leads the minority partner within the Executive, and in the week in which she presented her political project.
Government partners raise tension at the gates of the State of the Nation Debate
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“At this time I have no response from the Presidency of the Government, I suppose that before tomorrow they will tell us something,” Diaz acknowledged after having gone to the Council of Ministers. There has not been an aside from the vice president with Sánchez nor a four-way meeting as on other occasions between them with the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, and the Minister of Social Rights and leader of Podemos, Ione Belarra.
With these wickers and after weeks of clashes regarding defense spending in the framework of the NATO summit, which adds to the drink for the left of the change of position regarding Western Sahara decided by Sánchez alone to rebuild relations with Morocco, the president submits to the debate on the state of the nation, one of the most relevant in the legislature.
In Moncloa they have anticipated that Sánchez will take the opportunity to announce new measures “of great depth and very ambitious”. From United We Can they point out that they have only been informed that there will be new proposals with which they will agree. From the Díaz team they maintained this Monday at the last minute that “they are talking” and “moving proposals in both directions”, although they were unaware of the entirety of Sánchez’s speech. “The president will rise to the occasion and will give the speech he has to give,” Diaz responded Monday to the question of whether Sanchez will give the debate the “soul” that she has said the government lacks.
Those words posted on a interview in the country They have not sat well with the socialist wing of the Executive, which has replied to the second vice president. “The Government works with heart and intelligence”, was the response of the spokeswoman, Isabel Rodríguez, at the press conference after the cabinet meeting: “The Government’s heart and intelligence is shown in each and every one of the ministerial departments regardless of the political formation that leads them”.
“There will be no reason for discord,” they say in Moncloa about the measures that Sánchez will announce during the debate on the state of the nation, which will not have an immediate regulatory translation. “They are going to be measures that are going to make all citizens happy”, they respond to the question of whether United We Can agree with them. “We are going to come out of that debate strong,” these sources add in reference to the coalition.
However, the intention of United We Can was that the monitoring table of the agreement, which has always met to stage the resolution of conflicts, be convened beforehand, although the details were previously polished in small groups at the highest level. Sánchez’s refusal of that demand from Díaz makes the conflict open to the debate that begins this Tuesday and that will dominate the political activity of the week.
Díaz announced last week the request for an “urgent call” of the coalition’s monitoring commission after the Council of Ministers approved an extraordinary credit of 1,000 million euros for defense spending. The vice president claimed to have found out through the media, although the matter was included in the topics of the Commission of Secretaries and Undersecretaries, which is the prelude to the cabinet meeting. Without Sánchez’s team answering the request, the vice president assumed that there would be an agreement regarding military spending. But the “stop along the way” that she demanded from Sánchez is also to talk about new measures to curb inflation.
In Moncloa they minimized Diaz’s demand from the beginning, which was the first time he had raised his voice, and they have not yet set a date for the table meeting. In any case, government sources assure that it will not be this week. The cooling collides with the tension that the partners have experienced in recent weeks and that Podemos has maintained until this Monday when the spokesman for the formation, Javier Sánchez, has warned the PSOE that if “it does not correct the course” the budgets that the Government is beginning to prepare “they may be the last” since the progressive parties will not have electoral strength, in the opinion of the minority partner of the Executive, to revalidate the coalition.
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