The stoppage has been almost total. The government has been making very few decisions for three weeks. But he has taken the opportunity to rearm himself politically in the face of the hardest start to the season since Pedro Sánchez is president, an autumn full of political fires that he fully faces as of this Tuesday: the outbreaks, the reopening of schools, the economic crisis, the judicial pressure on Podemos, Vox's motion of censure ... Sánchez clings to European money - Budgets are already being prepared with that mattress - and the option to agree with Cs. The coalition is unbreakable, the PSOE and Podemos coincide, but there is internal tension.
The Council of Ministers that this Tuesday will open the political season is proof that the Executive has almost completely stopped its activity, exhausted after the most difficult months in the political life of any of its members. On the scheduled agenda, except for surprises, there is no powerful topic. Neither does the new memory law being finalized by Vice President Carmen Calvo.
However, the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, is expected to make a detailed report on the situation of the pandemic in Spain, the country with the worst data in Europe at the moment. And from there the political situation and next fall will be analyzed. Not one of the ten ministers consulted in recent days minimizes the seriousness of the situation. It is the worst start in many years, full of uncertainties, with a second wave of the pandemic underway and the possibility that it will be complicated when the cold arrives.
Illa maintains that, despite everything, the situation is not even remotely similar to that of March, when the state of alarm was decreed. The Government rejects for the moment the pressure, especially from the PP, to regain political control and thus avoid the wear and tear that some autonomies such as Madrid are suffering, which have been in the front line with some very bad data and are now asking that the Government resume control, the opposite of what they claimed in June.
Executive sources insist that this will not happen while the situation is contained, as they believe it is now. But Illa and the president's team have the mechanisms ready in case that leap is necessary. Only a very strong worsening could change that fundamental political decision.
The government is especially focused on the economic situation. And there will be the strongest tensions between some members of the Executive within the socialist bloc and especially with the representatives of United We Can. The first big decision is the expansion or not of the ERTE, which decline on September 30. The Government has summoned the leadership of employers and unions on September 4 in the Balearic Islands, the epicenter of the tourism crisis. And there the extension for this sector and others especially affected will be negotiated. But the prolongation of the ERTE represents an important hole for the public treasury - which is responsible for the cost of that stoppage in companies - so the tension between the economic team of the socialist bloc, led by Nadia Calviño, and that of United Podemos, in the hands of the Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, will dominate the next few weeks.
As a backdrop will be the dispute over the labor reform, which both United We Can and the unions and some sectors of the PSOE want to retouch to prevent workers from facing a very tough crisis this fall with the legislation approved by the PP in 2012. Calviño and the bosses insist that this is not the time to get there and appeal to Brussels, because they believe that such reform would be very frowned upon by the European institutions at a time when Spain, like Italy, is in the hands of the reconstruction fund.
That money is the great mattress with which the 2021 Budget is already being prepared, which the Government wanted to get with ERC but is beginning to assume more and more - although United We Can and socialist sectors still reject it - that it will only be able to leave with Cs.
Political rearmament also involves the compromise that Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias have closed in various conversations: there is no other option for governance than to maintain the coalition, and it is better to agree because both parties can do a lot of damage to each other. The tension, evident, came alive to the last council, on August 4, and forced a meeting in which several ministers spoke very clearly and expressed some important reproaches to conclude on that idea: the coalition must resist.
Some socialist ministers point out that the weakness of Podemos after its poor electoral results in Galicia and the wear and tear due to the judicial pressure it suffers - there are three investigations that affect it - will make it lose weight in decisions, especially economic ones. Furthermore, they insist that Iglesias has no choice but to cling to the coalition.
But both the group of Iglesias and other ministers of the PSOE point out that the president and the leader of Unidas Podemos have a very solid substantive agreement that gives the margin of decision on issues relevant to Iglesias. This internal tension will mark the economic management of the crisis and the balance of the Government, but all the ministers consulted agree: if there are Budgets, the legislature will be consolidated for a long time.
