The Balearic pact 2027 between the PP and Vox will leave a legacy
Starting this week, we'll begin to see where the relationship between the PP and Vox might be headed, and therefore, we'll have a rough idea of how it will impact Balearic politics right after next year's elections.
After the regional elections in Castile and León this Sunday, there will be three governments in place: Castile and León, Extremadura, and Aragon. Time is ticking, and it's already on borrowed time in the case of Extremadura. If there's no agreement to form a government between the two right-wing parties within six weeks, another round of elections will be called. So, we'll see what happens soon.
There aren't many options. The first is that they make governing pacts everywhere, similar to 2023, whether with far-right representation in the regional governments or with the neo-fascists providing external support; The resulting situation could be defined as a forced or convenient peace, so that the conflict between the two wouldn't jeopardize their joint victory in the upcoming general elections against Pedro Sánchez. The second possibility is that there would only be agreement in certain areas; that is, a kind of partial war, limited to some territories. The third is that they would agree everywhere but only on investitures, without going any further, and therefore leaving open the option of resuming hostilities: a temporary truce while awaiting how the situation would evolve. And the fourth and finally, that they wouldn't agree on anything anywhere; that is, open, total war.
Whatever happens, in the Balearic Islands it won't depend on the will of the regional leadership of the PP, much less on that of Vox. For the purposes of a possible future pact between the two parties, what Marga Prohens or the Balearic fascist leadership says or does will be of little or no value. Everything will depend on what happens between the two national leaderships.
In the event of open warfare, there would be no governments anywhere, including, of course, in the Balearic Islands, and therefore it would be impossible for Prohens to retain her position. This national scenario, in the aftermath of the next general election, would place the country in an extreme position, which seems to be the PSOE's strategy, hoping for a defeat that would result in an impossible Feijóo government—either preventing him from being invested as Prime Minister or allowing a Vox-backed coalition to pressure him into taking office—and Sánchez remaining in La Moncloa. If, on the other hand, the PP and Vox were to reach an agreement, under any of the described options, including a truce, the door would be opened to a new island pact. So, what might the 2027 agreement look like?
We've had a taste of what's to come, with the unabashed far-right's determination to force the repeal of the Democratic Memory Law by turning the Catalan Parliament into a festival of denialism and historical revisionism.
This has been the consequence of months of the PP's growing weakness in the face of a Vox party that's increasingly gaining ground everywhere, with polls that have the Galician leader scratching his head at how badly things have been going for him over the last nine months. Here, this has translated into the far-right demanding that Prohens, if she wanted a budget, it had to be in exchange, above all, for the repeal of the Democratic Memory Law. Nothing new, it's true, but their obstinacy revealed their objective of forcing Prohens to accept a double dose for not having wanted to drink the broth before. They had agreed to eliminate the law in 2023, but the PP, uncomfortable, did everything it could to sabotage it. Until the need to balance the books overwhelmed her and she had no choice but to bow her head. Last Tuesday. It was significant that neither the spokesperson nor the president wanted to defend the disgrace.
More relevant for the future was the tone of the far-right spokesperson's speech. He referred to the coup that sparked the Civil War as theliftFollowing Francoist terminology, he defended the lie of fraudulent elections—something that numerous historians have portrayed for what it is: a fabrication by authors of fascist revisionism—which, he said, rendered the Republican government of the Popular Front "illegitimate." Pure denialism with the obvious pretension that it cannot escape anyone.
For the purposes of this analysis, the outrageous things the character said—who was simply playing himself—are not so important; rather, the realization is that the PP had no other option, if it wanted a budget, than to swallow the mouthful of political castor oil that Vox served it on Tuesday. And this is precisely what the future foreshadowed. Everyone will have their own opinion on what Prohens should do, but given that the PSOE won't form a coalition with the PP, it would be pathologically naive to wait for the conservatives to be out of power and let the left take over, thus avoiding a pact with the sinister neo-fascism we saw the other day.
The argument leads to the only possible conclusion about what the 2027 agreement will be like: it will be a legacy.