Spain – Europe Brief News, On Monday morning, the president of the CEOE employers’ association, Antonio Garamendi, staged a media reconciliation with the opposition leader, Pablo Casado, on account of his evident differences over his organization’s pact with the Government on the labour counter-reform.
Hours later he met with the PSOE spokesman in Congress, Héctor Gómez, to review the allies that this project now has to be validated by the Cortes in just two weeks. Garamendi confirmed with Gómez that the coalition Executive of the PSOE and United We Can not have advanced to guarantee this reform from its usual partners, ERC, PNV and EH Bildu. Ciudadanos confirms that in their talks with the CEOE, ATA and regional employer organizations such as Foment del Treball, they have indicated their willingness to join this project if the Executive does not give in to the demands of the nationalist allies. And the socialist leader corroborated that the employers are working on their part in their bilateral contacts with other parties, mainly Citizens (with nine deputies), and the Union of the Navarrese People, Forum Asturias or Teruel Exists, to ask them to support that reform.
The decree of the labour reform needs more affirmative votes than negative to prosper, and for now, it only adds the 154 that PSOE and United We Can have. Other parties such as the Canarian Coalition, Nueva Canarias, the Catalans of the PDeCAT, the Regionalist Party of Cantabria, Teruel Exists, Más País, Compromís and even the Unión del Pueblo Navarro have anticipated their positive predisposition to endorse a pact forged before with the social agents. These formations could add up to 13 more parliamentarians and reach around 176 seats. With the nine Cs, they would reach 163. The key would be, in that case, that some of the formations that generally vote with the Executive (especially the PNV) abstain.
The calendar to endorse in the Cortes the agreement between the current Government and the social agents to change the labour reform of the PP of 2012 tightens, the negotiations and pressures are multiplying on several fronts, and the results are still not in sight. The second vice president and head of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, insisted again on Monday on sending a message of optimism about the parliamentary contacts promoted from her department and predicted that “she has no doubt” that the initiative agreed with the CEOE and the unions will come out ahead, because he understands that “it would not make sense for it not to come out” and because he defends that it will mean “changing the sign of the times and people’s lives, and recovering rights for workers for the first time”.
Díaz, in addition, has been fully involved these days in these discreet conversations and still maintains within the Executive that there are possibilities that they will prosper and some of the investiture partners will vote for the reform. The positions, however, of ERC and EH Bildu remain unshakable in their claims and in their intention, for now, to vote against the social pact, as confirmed by socialist sources familiar with the meetings. And they do not see their PNV interlocutors as very flexible either. However, on Monday, the parliamentary spokesman, Aitor Esteban, moderated his frontal rejection of these weeks quite a bit and pointed out certain hopes about his demand for the prevalence of regional agreements over state ones: “The base is done, the agreement in a large percentage is done, but some small modifications are perfectly assumable, they do not break the core of the pact, and they should go ahead, and if not, they cannot say that they were not warned, we have told them actively and by passive. Esteban also demanded a parliamentary dialogue table on the reform.
In this political context, full of complexities and contradictory positions, the Basque parties have to deal in Euskadi with the call by the main unions (ELA and LAB, among others) for demonstrations on January 30 against the reform. ERC speaks directly of “blackmail” of an Executive that sees “disappointing” because it hardly shows them its interest in “moving even a comma and they veto any possibility of improving the text”, according to Marta Vilalta, the spokeswoman for the Republican formation. ERC is still installed for now in the no to that project.