In politics, when the room for maneuver narrows, every move counts double. And that is exactly what Sumar is doing in this final phase of the legislature: turning every relevant vote into a strategic pressure tool on the PSOE and, incidentally, on the entire parliamentary board.
The refusal of the ministers from the minority wing of the Government to participate in Friday's Council of Ministers meeting was not an improvised gesture. It was part of a strategy in full recomposition of their political space. “We were clear about it, it was decided, and we are satisfied with the result,” sources from Sumar confirm.
And boy was it.
If one goes back to Wednesday, after the control session, a scene is found that today makes sense: the crossing in the corridors of Congress between the Minister of Health, Mónica García, and the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños. It was an apparently minor moment, but revealing.
While Bolaños was responding about whether the decree would incorporate Sumar's demands regarding housing and tenant protection, García —who was passing right behind— interrupted him with unusual certainty: “Yes, for sure.”
And so it was.
The strategy has several layers. On the one hand, toughen negotiations in key areas —social, labor, and fiscal justice— to extract “concrete and more ambitious concessions,” according to Yolanda Díaz’s circle. On the other, build its own narrative that allows Sumar to differentiate itself from the PSOE without abandoning the Executive.
It is a policy of balance: to govern and compete at the same time. Or, put another way, to survive within without disappearing outside.
Although the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, tried to lower the tension by calling it “drama” and framing it within “the politics of dialogue”, in Moncloa they have indeed assumed that they must open space for the demands of their partner. Hence the double decree, which for now functions more as a political gesture than as a structural solution.
Triangular offensive to approve the decrees
Sánchez is a self-confessed basketball lover. And perhaps it would be convenient for him to apply some of its logics to the decisive match that is played this Thursday in Congress.
The Official State Gazette already includes the two royal decrees that must be validated —on different dates— by the Lower House. In the Government, they take for granted that the main one, the one valued at 5,000 million euros —which includes tax cuts such as the reduction of energy VAT— will go ahead. But parliamentary arithmetic once again puts caution on the table: neither all partners have confirmed their support nor has the PP made a move.
In that context, Moncloa seems obliged to play a kind of “triangular offensive”: more than a closed play, a constant reading system where no actor monopolizes the leading role and all must get involved to achieve the objective.
The second decree, promoted by Sumar —which freezes contracts at risk and sets 2% caps on updates— is already in force, but doesn't even have a date for its validation. And there the scenario gets even more complicated.
The doubts of the PNV, the announced rejection of Junts and the frontal opposition of PP and VOX draw, to begin with, a negative balance. The Government once again depends on a vote-by-vote, decree-by-decree negotiation.
New excuse to delay the budgets
Sánchez has reiterated on multiple occasions his intention to “sweat the shirt” to approve new General State Budgets. However, the reality is another: the Executive has shifted the focus, once again, towards immediate survival, towards those 176 essential votes to save each initiative.
The argument now is the war and its economic consequences. The priority, say government sources, is to respond to the crisis.
But the underlying question remains intact: can a Government sustain an entire legislature based on decrees without presenting public accounts?
Because beyond the urgency, what is already to be drawn is not a strategy, but a resignation. And in politics, when one renounces the Budgets, one also renounces —although it is not said aloud— an essential part of the direction.