Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez decided to serve out the remainder of his third term after briefly threatening to resign following allegations of corruption against his wife, Begoña Gómez. Though Spain’s national prosecutor’s office has already recommended that the case be dismissed due to a lack of evidence, Sánchez and many members of his leftist coalition suspect that the legal action against Gómez—brought by the anti-corruption organization Manos Limpias (Clean Hands)—is politically motivated.

Though Manos Limpias claims to be politically neutral, its most famous cases have focused on Catalan separatism and targeted prominent left-wing causes, such as the one that it brought against judge Baltasar Garzón for investigating human rights violations that occurred during the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing nearly 40-year dictatorship.

Ultimately, though, it is not Manos Limpias that decides whether to pursue the case against Gómez or anyone else it targets. The more important question is whether the judge in the Gómez case is politically motivated, having launched a preliminary investigation into her business activities on the basis of such weak evidence.

Sánchez is therefore justified in suspecting that the case against his wife could be politically charged—and possibly a reaction to the controversial amnesty deal that he recently made with Catalan secessionists.

Last fall, Sánchez secured parliamentary approval for an amnesty deal that potentially benefits hundreds of Catalan separatists. The complex and divisive process that resulted in the deal began with an inconclusive general election last summer, when the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Sánchez’s party, had to scrape together an agreement with two pro-independence Catalan groups in order to form a coalition government.

The secessionist groups, the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Junts per Catalunya, were quick to name a high price for propping Sánchez up. They demanded amnesty for all those prosecuted or awaiting prosecution for their roles in staging the 2017 independence referendum, which was declared illegal in advance by Spain’s Constitutional Court.

Though the turnout was low at 43 percent, 92 percent of Catalans voted to split from Spain, prompting Catalonia’s then-president, Carles Puigdemont, to make a unilateral declaration of independence in an address to the regional parliament. The federal government, then led by conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, responded by suspending the region’s powers of autonomy and, on the day of the vote itself, sending in police to seize ballot boxes and barricade polling stations.

Puigdemont has since been in self-imposed exile in Belgium and would be the highest-profile beneficiary of the amnesty deal, which was approved by a narrow vote in Spain’s lower house of parliament in March. The bill has been filibustered by Spain’s conservative-dominated upper house since then, but when it returns to the lower house on May 14, it will almost certainly be approved by a second vote and become law. (Even if Spain’s Senate vetoes legislation, it can still be passed by an absolute majority the second time around.)

Despite being backed by a majority of Catalans, the amnesty bill is hugely unpopular throughout the rest of Spain. A poll conducted last fall found that 70 percent of Spaniards surveyed were opposed to it becoming law, including 59 percent who voted for the PSOE in June 2023. Protests, some violent, erupted across the country in opposition to the deal, which conservative leader Alberto Feijóo has described  as “the greatest affront to dignity, equality and the separation of powers seen in a western democracy.” A group of magistrates from the Spanish judiciary regard the pact as effectively meaning “the abolition of the rule of law in Spain.” It is scant consolation for the deal’s many critics that national and regional judges would have the power to review pleas on a case-by-case basis.

Brussels has also expressed concern—in November 2023, months before the proposed amnesty bill was approved by the lower house, the European Union’s justice chief requested details from the Spanish government regarding the bill’s potential scope and force. The EU also ruled last summer that Puigdemont, who currently serves as a member of the European Parliament, should lose his parliamentary immunity—a move that, barring the amnesty deal, would have allowed for his extradition to and prosecution in Spain.

Over the past five years, Sánchez has completely reversed course over Catalan independence. In 2019, when Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced nine leading separatists to prison for up to 13 years for orchestrating the 2017 vote, he described the sentences as the result of an “exemplary legal process.” Two years later, when he was more reliant on Catalan separatists’ support in parliament, he pardoned the same secessionists and insisted that they would not be asked to renounce their political cause in exchange for freedom.

Given the PSOE leader’s increased dependency on Catalan support over that period as well as his initial promise to comply with the Supreme Court’s sentences, it is hard to believe that his flip-flopping was motivated by anything other than expediency.

Still, Sánchez could just about get away with granting the pardons and maintaining the government’s official unionist line: Releasing prisoners only indicated that he believed their punishment was excessive, not that there had been no offense in the first place.

In contrast, “amnesty” is derived from the Greek word amnesia (which means the act of forgetting), and it effectively implies that no crime was committed in the first place and that the 2017 Catalan independence referendum was legal. Plus, since the amnesty deal was named by Catalan separatists as the price of their support for Sánchez during his third term, it comes with zero conditions attached for them. Secessionists are pulling the strings that control Sánchez, rather than the other way around.

For this reason, the Spanish prime minister is mistaken if he thinks that the amnesty bill will guarantee Junts’ and ERC’s votes for the remainder of his third term, or ease relations between unionists and secessionists. Whereas Sánchez hailed their deal as a “brave and necessary step towards reunion,” separatists, including the Catalan President Pere Aragonès, will likely use it as a political tool to renew the battle for an independent Catalonia.

Blocking their path, however, is the Spanish Constitution, which is fundamentally committed to the “indissoluble unity” of the country. This was the basis for the Constitutional Court’s ruling that the 2017 referendum was illegal, and why any attempt at a repeat—perhaps modeled on the vote that took place in Scotland in 2014­—would run into difficulties. Unless the relevant sections of the constitution are altered in advance by parliamentary approval, the referendum would still be illegal. Thus, by attempting to grant the amnesties at the same time as insisting that there is no possibility of a state-approved referendum, Sánchez has ensnared himself in a Catch-22.

If Sánchez were to permit a referendum on Catalan secession, it would be the biggest risk taken by a Spanish premier in the country’s post-Franco democratic era.

Yet there are strong indications that now is the perfect time to do so, as far as unionists are concerned. A poll published in November 2023 showed that support within Catalonia for independence has dropped to just 31 percent, its lowest point in more than a decade (even as 60 percent of Catalans back the amnesty deal). It also looks as if Aragonès’s pro-independence minority coalition, long debilitated by fratricidal tensions, is finally on its way out.

One day before Spain’s lower house approved the amnesty, Aragonès announced an early regional election in Catalonia for May 12, prompted by his government’s inability to pass this year’s budget. (The next vote was not due to be held until early 2025.) Polls indicate that the PSOE will come first, and that support for two of the three main pro-independence forces—including Aragonès’s party, the ERC, and the more hard-line Popular Unity Candidacy—will drop significantly, making it uncertain whether the secessionists will be able to form a regional coalition by themselves.

But their failure to do so wouldn’t necessarily take the pressure off Sánchez in the national parliament: Boosted by the amnesty deal, secessionists are likely to keep requesting a legal referendum on independence.

Shortly after Aragonès announced the early elections, Sánchez canceled Spain’s 2024 budget, opting instead to roll over the 2023 budget on the basis that the ERC and Junts will be too distracted by campaigning to steer this year’s spending plan through parliament. It’s a move that highlights the logistical difficulties that will mark the rest of his third term: Even if the amnesty deal becomes law, Sánchez will still have to win the support of the ERC and Junts on a case-by-case basis. That, in turn, will result in increased hostility from the right regarding collaboration with secessionists—and potentially also from the factions of the prime minister’s own party that opposed the amnesty deal in the first place.

Theoretically, there is one way out of this impasse for Sánchez: backing another independence referendum in Catalonia, much like Westminster backed the Scottish vote in 2014, on the reasonable expectation that it would fail. If it did, he could then claim to have met all the separatists’ demands at the same time as having strengthened the union.

But the constitutional and legal difficulties render this course of action virtually impossible. Instead, Sánchez will spend his third term at the mercy of emboldened separatists, locked into a stance on Catalan secession that is no longer credible.