Three months after Spain’s general election produced an inconclusive outcome, negotiations are underway to form a new left-leaning coalition. The difficulties in creating such an alliance center on one problem: the possibility of a sweeping amnesty law for the Catalan independence movement. This is the core demand that proindependence parties have insisted on, in exchange for offering their voters to a new administration led by Pedro Sánchez’s center-left Socialists (PSOE) and the radical-left Sumar.

At the polls in July, incumbent prime minister Sánchez managed to deny the right-wing parties (the Partido Popular and Vox) an expected victory, but his own coalition also fell well short of a majority. Currently acting prime minister, the Socialist leader can only form a stable government with the support of the Catalan proindependence forces, including former Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont’s Junts per Catalunya. Sánchez has now signaled his willingness to negotiate the highly sensitive amnesty, which is opposed not just by the political right but also by the old guard of his own PSOE and by much of the upper echelons of the Spanish judiciary.