Spain’s PM confirms he will hand back control to regional premiers from June 8

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has announced today that he will hand back control to regional governments next week.

FINALLY on June 8, Spain’s regional premiers can regain control over their own territories and drive their own de-escalation processes at a speed of their choosing, except for laws governing mobility, confirmed Sanchez.

In a press statement today, Sanchez stated: “From June 8, with more than half of the country in Phase 3 of de-escalation, it will be the regional heads who will decide how to manage the speed of de-escalation, including the phase changes, as well as the duration.” They will also recover powers over mobility once a region completes Phase 3, or after the State of Alarm finishes, which may well be June 21, if he gets enough votes to get a sixth lockdown extension agreed.

However, Sanchez promised that the last State of Alarm extension will be “lighter and different” than in the past, as “the evolution of the epidemic is much better than we had predicted and why the government will not seek any more extensions to the State of Alarm beyond June 21.”

Given recent pacts made with various independent political parties, including the ERC (Catalan Republic Party) and PNV (Basque Nationalist Party), it looks as though Sanchez may well succeed to win enough votes to get a sixth and final extension to the lockdown agreed, when he returns to Congress on Wednesday next week.