With the number of coronavirus cases surpassing 7,500 and the death toll at over 280, this weekend Spain’s left-wing government declared a state of emergency. Following Italy, the entire country has been placed in a two-week lockdown, starting Monday. The government has granted itself extraordinary powers to take control of all private hospitals, to mobilize other necessary private resources (like those of the pharmaceutical industry), and to place autonomous (regional) administrations under Madrid’s direct control.

Yet the forces which backed Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s reelection in January have been divided by these measures. Early critics included the Basque and Catalan parties, who accused the Socialist (PSOE) premier Pedro Sánchez of using the crisis to make a centralizing power grab. This itself showed how far the coordinates of Spanish politics have been upended by the crisis. An administration elected just two months ago on the promise of dialogue with Catalonia’s pro-independence government has now been forced to make an unprecedented intervention in the autonomous regions.

But also disputed is the question of who will pay for the crisis. After a seven-hour cabinet meeting on Saturday, the PSOE and its left-wing coalition partner Unidas Podemos were unable to reach an agreement on economic measures aimed to protect workers from loss of income. Deputy premier Pablo Iglesias broke quarantine to attend (after his partner, Equality Minister Irene Montero tested positive) as he and other Unidas Podemos ministers squared off against PSOE Economics Minister Nadia Calviño and Finance Minister María Jesús Montero. The government’s two financial heavyweights refused to accept the economic interventions that the Podemos leader was pushing for, as they instead prioritized controlling the budget deficit — and rebuffed the idea of a European stimulus package.