Coronavirus: the lost Spanish democratic union

Madrid

During his last press conference last Saturday, the president of the government resorted to an old image of Epinal of Spanish politics: the Moncloa pacts. A reference to the negotiations launched at the seat of government in 1977, two years after the death of Franco and one year after the adoption of the Constitution, which enabled parties, unions and employers' organizations, to lay together the new economic and social foundations of modern Spain. When Pedro Sanchez said he wanted to launch " new Moncloa pacts" to rebuild the country at the end of the crisis, he therefore mobilized a powerful collective imagination, stronger, perhaps, than the Grenelle Agreements in France. It calls for a historic national union, almost mythical, which in any case has not been reproduced since the transition, the passage from dictatorship to democracy.

Read also: Coronavirus: Spain in the grip of an out of control situation

The fact is that this sacred union, for the moment, cannot be found. Certainly the center, the right and even

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