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🇪🇸 demonstrations took place yesterday against the @sanchezcastejon government. They were organised by 3 political parties, specifically the conservative @PPopular , centre-right @CiudadanosCs and far right #Vox who accuse Sanchez of treason and call for a general election. 📣👇
The pretext sparking the rally was Sanchez accepting an independent facilitator in future talks with the Catalans. Adding to this is that Rajoy was ousted in a no confidence vote last June and elections have not been called to give Sanchez a democratic mandate.
Sanchez relied on Catalan support in the no confidence vote and has been holding talks with regional Catalan leaders to ease tensions 👉The Sanchez approach to Catalonia is also driven by pragmatic reasons, since is dependent on their support to pass legislation e.g. his budget.
PP has always been a conservative party but has been playing up the "unity of Spain"narrative under Casado&shifting to the right. The recent success of Vox in Andalusia might be driving this change, feeding off the impression that PP lacked a tough stance on Catalan separatism.
The polarisation of opinions, pitting Catalan independentists against PP, Vox and Ciudadanos, does not bode well for future talks; finding a consensus through dialogue already seems unlikely. Catalan separatist parties still refuse to back the 2019 budget and talks were...
...called off on Friday.The difficulty of mending divisions between PSOE(where many oppose Sanchez's views) and Catalan parties compounded by a bloc of opposition of 3 political parties who amount to roughly 60% of the Spanish vote makes a conciliatory path ahead improbable...
This issue is national in nature, but since European elections are still mostly fought on national agendas, one can expect Vox to enter the EP, though they are not yet part of a European party.
This comes as the publicised trial of 12 Catalan separatist leaders of the 2017 independence will take place tomorrow in Madrid. Also, Spanish Prime Minister @sanchezcastejon today announced he is considering calling Spanish general elections on April 14. 🇪🇸
