Will Sanchez stay in power by promising Catalans things he can’t deliver?

It’s now looking fairly likely that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will cling onto power by allying with Catalan separatists. That support doesn’t come for free.

I’m in Barcelona this summer, spending all of August here working on a project, and it’s an interesting time to be in Catalonia. Following last month’s inconclusive Spanish election, negotiations are ongoing to form a government and the Catalan separatists have emerged as the kingmakers.

Center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who had to call an election in the next year and was expected to be defeated when he did, took a risk by calling a snap election early shortly after he suffered a big defeat in local elections in May. His bet was that voters would be turned off by the local government formation negotiations ongoing at that time, with the center-right Popular Party (PP) entering local alliances with the new far-right party Vox. PP leader Alberto Feijóo was expected to do the same at national level if PP and Vox could together win enough seats to control the parliament. But Sanchez’s gamble paid off. Though Feijóo’s PP may have “won” the election by coming in first, they and Vox did not win enough seats to form a government. With the memory of General Francisco Franco’s far-right dictatorship still very fresh in this country, voters were turned off by the prospect of the far-right re-entering government after four decades (something not felt in other countries where memories of fascism are not as fresh, such as Italy).