Spain has (almost) a government: Pedro Sanchez will guide it and will be formed by the alliance between its socialists and the left-wing anti-system of Podemos by Pablo Iglesias, plus the Basque nationalists of the Pnv. The white smoke, expected after months of impasse and four early elections in four years, was allowed by the Catalan leftist independence of the ERC, whose National Council in the evening approved by an overwhelming majority the abstention vote of its 13 deputies.
And that will allow Sanchez to have a majority vote of confidence (which in Spain is called an "investiture"), scheduled on January 7th. But it will have a political price: the recognition of the "Catalan conflict" as "political", and no longer only as an institutional crime. Conflict which will therefore be resolved with a "bilateral negotiating table", which does not provide for "vetoes" on any proposal, as it is written in black and white in the Erc-Psoe agreement, of which the newspaper El Pais anticipated the text. Therefore, it is presumed, even a possible re-proposal of the "referendum on self-determination" of Catalonia, after that unilaterally convened by the Generalitat of Barcelona and ended with a series of arrests and convictions, including that of the ERC leader, Oriol Junqueras. The Catalan republicans have asked that the table have as conditions that the negotiation is between 'governments', has no foreclosures or taboo arguments and instead has a calendar of work. Concessions not just snatched from the socialists of Sanchez, who in the campaign for the political elections of November had flaunted intransigence towards Catalan independence.