A small group of Junts per Catalunya leaders met yesterday with former president Carles Puigdemont in Northern Catalonia, in the south of France, to address the state of the negotiations on the investiture. The current MEP is no longer part of the party’s governing bodies – he left the presidency in June 2022 – but he is the one who is leading the negotiations with the Socialists for the possible investiture of Pedro Sánchez and explained how they the contacts with the socialists.
Unlike other parties, JxCat has not designated in public who is part of its negotiating team, although it has transpired that the former president is the one in the engine room and yesterday he dispatched in relation to this matter with some members from the management of his utmost confidence as the general secretary, Jordi Turull; the president, Laura Borràs; the leader of the training in Madrid, Míriam Nogueras; the president of the Parliament group, Albert Batet, or the spokesperson and vice-president of the formation, Josep Rius, who was Puigdemont’s chief of staff when he was president, among others.
At the moment, little is known about the course of the negotiations by Junts. The training provides the information with a dropper and always refers to the same script, the one set by the former president at the beginning of September, with the requirement of a “historical commitment”.
The now MEP takes the reins of the talks with the PSOE and doses the information. The only thing that transpires for now from the post-convergent ranks is that the agreement is still to be put on track and at the headquarters of the party they are working taking into account all possible scenarios, which ends in agreement and investiture, but also what leads to an electoral repeat next January.
The amnesty is part of the negotiation, already without funnels, but there are also other tangible issues on the table. This week Puigdemont, in response to some words from the former president of the Spanish government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, took the opportunity to once again demand a mediator or a verifier to give an account of the agreements reached and ensure their compliance. For this, Junts believes that the best would be an international figure and not a monitoring commission as proposed by the socialists. It is one of the points of friction between the two organizations.
Be that as it may, unlike other actors involved in the negotiation, JxCat has opted for hermeticism from the first day and now, almost three months have passed since the general elections were held, they note that this strategy – “prudence and silence”, they proclaim – it’s working well for them and it’s giving results.
The sources consulted compare his current situation with that of his former partner in the Government, Esquerra Republicana. The post-convergents think that the Republicans are now “gesturing” a lot because they are confused with the course of the negotiations. It is in this context that they include the appearance of President Pere Aragonès in the Senate, the fact that they assured a few weeks ago that the amnesty was already taken for granted one day if the other too or the hyperactivity of the Catalan Executive with the issue of the official status of Catalan in Europe, one of the commitments that JxCat made in the pact for the Bureau of the Congress of Deputies in August.
