With pensions we have run into

The third vice president of the Government, Nadia Calviño during a plenary session in Congress last Thursday.EUROPA PRESS / E.

Vine.

POOL / Europa Press

The government did not fall in the middle of the perfect storm, but now it faces an even more difficult period: rebuilding after the devastation caused by the coronavirus.

The unprecedented coalition that governs Spain for the first time since the 1930s has survived a still unresolved pandemic, but something channeled with a vaccination that begins next Sunday.

And in the midst of a huge economic crisis, with the opposition trying to dismount the Government, it has managed to create a comfortable majority to approve the Budgets.

However, now comes an even more delicate part: making the big economic decisions for reconstruction.

It is a journey for which there is no roadmap, because all the economic parameters with which the legislature began have turned upside down.

And it is there, in the design of those great economic decisions that must be taken now - minimum wage, labor reform, evictions, supply cuts and above all, the mother of the lamb, pension reform - where the coalition with more force than expected.

Precisely because now they are no longer strategic games: what is on the table is the design of economic policy.

Pedro Sánchez, according to Executive sources, is holding the pulse of United We Can in all these matters for various reasons, economic and political.

The president, in the middle of reconstruction, with the eyes of the economic world and of Brussels on the Government, wants to send a clear message: the economic policy is carried out by the socialist side of the Executive.

Not in vain did the Ministry of Economy, Finance, Transport, and Industry, and in fact it also wanted the Ministry of Labor - it never gave it up in the first negotiation in July 2019, and that partly explains the break - But he finally decided to hand it over to United We Can after the fiasco of the electoral repetition, in which the PSOE lost three seats and the group of Pablo Iglesias seven.

Sources from the Executive of the socialist sector point out that behind Sánchez's resistance to raising the minimum wage by nine euros (0.9%) as claimed by United We can, there is an intention to send that double message to the economic world, especially to businessmen.

First, that the Executive is going to help them.

"Now nothing can be done that could scare them, we need them to invest and trust again to relaunch the economy," says a member of the Government.

And the second message, more political, is to make it clear that it is the PSOE and not United We who have the upper hand in major decisions.

On the contrary, the group of Iglesias believes that Sánchez and his economic team, with Nadia Calviño at the head, have chosen a terrible field to fight that battle because freezing the minimum wage for only nine euros will be very difficult to explain in the progressive world .

Yolanda Díaz, the Minister of Labor, insists on convincing the PSOE that pensions, the salary of civil servants and salaries in general cannot be raised and freezing the lowest, those of the weakest part of the workers.

The battle in this matter is not resolved but Sánchez remains firm in his support for Nadia Calviño, his economic vice president, who is convinced that now raising the minimum wage even a little would be a terrible gesture for the business community and could cause job destruction .

In the middle of the internal battle between Calviño and Díaz over the minimum wage and other issues, no one missed the president's express support for the economic vice president in Congress.

"There are the facts that demonstrate their commitment to what this government represents from a progressive point of view," said Sánchez de Calviño.

United We can also assume that what is happening these days, in which they detect a resistance from Sánchez to their proposals much greater than on other occasions, has to do with that attempt by the president to make it clear that the socialist sector directs economic policy and show authority after the role of Iglesias in the budget negotiation.

And they assume that, as a small group within the coalition - they have 35 seats compared to 120 for the senior partner - they will lose several of the battles they have raised these days.

But there is something in which United We can assure that it will not yield under any circumstances, and it has those essential 35 seats to stop it: a pension reform like the one proposed by José Luis Escrivá, extending the calculation period from 25 to 35 years of working life.

That would imply a significant reduction in spending on pensions, which is what Brussels would be demanding from Spain, according to the version that they transfer from the socialist sector.

That is black on white in a document that will be sent shortly to Brussels as a promise to guarantee the arrival of the great European recovery fund that will save the Spanish economy.

The discussion is being intense in the Executive.

And United We can warn: it is impossible for that to be approved in Congress because it does not have their votes or many others, and Sánchez could hardly rely on the PP as an alternative.

Unidos Podemos is in fact beginning to move in Brussels as well to promote its ideas there, especially on labor reform, another very sensitive issue at the heart of European power. Minister Díaz traveled there this week and met with two key commissioners and it is likely that Iglesias himself will also go. Brussels is the natural terrain of Calviño, who spent most of his career there. Both sectors are thus preparing for a long substantive battle with the key issues of economic policy. The wages, working conditions and pensions of millions of people depend on its result.