"Sanchez resign" chanted the crowd as some 100,000 people took to the streets of Madrid to express their growing anger at a potential amnesty deal for Catalan politicians.

That deal could allow socialist party leader Pedro Sanchez to win another four-year mandate as Prime Minister at the head of a coalition government. He needs the support of the Catalan JUNTS party and its exiled leader Carles Puigdemont to form a new coalition government.

But the price of Puigdemont's support is an amnesty for him and the other architects of the 2017 illegal Catalan independence referendum, allowing them to return to Spain to continue advocating for independence for Catalonia.

The anti-amnesty protest on Sunday 29 October was organized by an association close to the far-right party VOX under the banner 'Against the Amnesty and the Sanchez Coup.' Held in the Plaza de Colon (Christopher Columbus Plaza), it was an hour punctuated by insults and indignation with chants rising in the crowd like "Puigdemont to prison," and "Sanchez sell-out."

CGTN spoke to Beatriz Morillo in the crowd who said "Sanchez is a traitor, a wannabe-dictator who doesn't care about the wellbeing of Spaniards, he'll do anything to stay in power."

Jaime Oliveira, a retiree, said "the president is a cynic because not long ago he said - and this was recorded on video - that an amnesty and a referendum were totally forbidden by the Spanish Constitution."

Sanchez: "Catalonia is ready to reunite [With Spain]"

A day before this protest Sanchez had defended the amnesty for the first time publicly, saying that it was the only way to form a government, keep the far right out of power and to heal what he called the 'open wound' of Catalan separatism.

"Catalonia is ready to reunite," Sanchez insisted. "More than 80 percent of Catalans support this measure," he continued, "and for those very reasons, in the name of Spain, in the interest of Spain, in defence of coexistence among Spaniards, I defend today the amnesty in Catalonia regarding events over the past decade."

Sanchez closer to forming government

Last week Sanchez struck a deal between his PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and the hard-left platform SUMAR led by Yolanda Diaz on a four-year policy road map. Furthermore, on Saturday many commentators took Sanchez' defense of an amnesty as a sign that an announcement of a deal with the Catalan JUNTS and ERC parties was imminent.

That has caused fury and resentment on the right of Spain's political divide, particularly at the possibility of Puigdemont walking free from charges of sedition.

It's an issue that continues to divide the nation, but Sanchez sounds ever-more confident that he will be able to govern in a broad coalition with some inside sources saying that an agreement could even be announced within days. Now the socialist party leader has until November 27h to win a vote to form a government in congress, and if he fails to do that then Spaniards will go back to the polls once more in January.

With an amnesty for Catalan politicians likely, we can expect many more protests like the one seen in Madrid and Malaga on Sunday, with this explosive issue running right along the fault lines of Spanish democracy. 

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