Staging is on the agenda. While in Congress Alberto Núñez Feijóo in his investiture debate attacks an amnesty law that is simmering, Pere Aragonès has left it behind to open a new phase in which the conditions of an independence referendum are set. “We know that the amnesty will be a reality,” the president stated emphatically in Parliament, during the General Policy Debate that will last until Friday. The Government and ERC consider the amnesty already done.
So much so that today Aragonès has avoided entertaining her during his speech. That it aspires to the opening of a new paradigm is clear in the following statements: “The amnesty is not the end, it is the starting point to stop looking at what has happened in the last ten years and start talking about what will happen in the future.” So he has raised the conditions for Pedro Sánchez and has demanded a “firm commitment” if he wants to be inaugurated.
“Let Pedro Sánchez take note,” Aragonès stressed. Sánchez only has one option to be re-elected and this is to have the favorable votes, among others, of ERC and Junts. “We have the key to the governability of the State, and we must use it,” Aragonès made it very clear in Parliament. The president has demanded “courage” and “decision” from the socialist leader to address self-determination if he is sworn in as president of the Government. For the head of the Government, it is not enough for Sánchez to present himself “with the scarecrow of the return of the right and the extreme right.” Therefore, the 2023-2027 legislature, which Aragonès has taken for granted that he will lead the PSOE, can only be understood as the one that allows Catalonia to set the conditions for a referendum.
“Our duty is to take advantage of the opportunity,” Aragonès stressed in a message addressed to ERC and Junts. For weeks now, the Republican Party and his party have been trying to get the post-convergers to agree to a joint negotiation. Carles Puigdemont’s men avoid it, for the moment. Even so, the president has pointed out in the Catalan Chamber that, having the key to governability in Madrid, the independence groups should “extract from Sánchez the commitment that Catalonia votes if he wants to be president.” “This is the new phase of the negotiation that we have to open. Plain and simple: amnesty and self-determination,” he highlighted.
Aragonès has divided his intervention into four blocks. In the first he has focused on the need to advance opportunities, well-being and prosperity for citizens, drawing the Catalan language as a cohesive element of population diversity. Next, he addressed the four major “transformations” that, according to what he said, he has been carrying out since the legislature began: social, ecological, feminist and democratic (which includes the right to self-determination). In the third block, the president has dedicated it to pointing out the most outstanding policies of each of the departments of the Generalitat, as well as their future commitments in the remainder of the Catalan legislature. The denunciation of a fiscal deficit that the Generalitat has estimated at 22,000 million euros has been one of the elements that he has introduced to denounce the difficulties in carrying out social policies.
In this sense, the head of the Government is convinced that he can exhaust the four years of his mandate. The Republican experienced a highly complicated situation last year, precisely in the last General Policy Debate. Junts overshadowed the clarity agreement that Aragonès announced in the Parliament to set the conditions for a referendum in Catalonia by demanding a question of confidence if he did not comply with three of the investiture agreements signed between ERC and JxCat in mid-2021.
The next day, Aragonès dismissed the then vice president of the Government, Jordi Puigneró. The post-convergents left the Catalan Executive a few days later. ERC was forced to move forward with the sole support of its 33 deputies – the majority in the Parliament is 68 – and to open the doors to the PSC for the first time in years to try to approve some budgets of the Generalitat. The socialists pushed the talks to the limit, but finally Aragonès was able to save the match point. Currently, with Sánchez’s investiture still up in the air, the PSC is no longer demanding elections and could be conditioned to negotiate new Catalan budgets.
However, the resolution of the political conflict continues to attract all attention. “Conflict of sovereignty,” Aragonès has renamed it, who has rejected expressions such as “coexistence problem” or “reunion,” so much in the mouth of the PSOE, as “fitting into the State,” expressed erratically by Feijóo a few weeks ago. “But Nor do we have to limit the conflict to repression” and solve it with amnesty, Aragonès has judged.
The president has valued the little more than three years of open negotiations between the Spanish and Catalan governments, with the pardons and the repeal of the crime of sedition from the Penal Code “It is a difficult path, very difficult, because the starting points” in one and the other side of the table “are very distant, and not everyone felt encouraged to participate,” Aragonès claimed in a message to Junts.
Aragonès has insisted on the idea that ERC and Junts must take advantage of the fact that in a future Sánchez term they are key since “this time an alternative majority cannot be built with Ciudadanos every time” that the pro-independence groups arise.
The amnesty has been taken for granted. The president has had no qualms about being “convinced that it will be a reality” and at some point in his speech he has come to assume that before the end of the Catalan legislature he will receive Carles Puigdemont, Marta Rovira at the Palau de la Generalitat “and the rest of the exiles.” “We will put an end to six years of suffering,” he added, which will culminate, as he said, with the filing of all the cases against the independence movement that are still open. “The amnesty is a fact,” he declared.
But the condition for Sánchez to be inaugurated is that the socialist leader firmly commits to a referendum. Aragonès has once again used the agreement of clarity so that all parties set the rules of the game, taking the example of Scotland, Ireland or Quebec. The president has announced at this point that the experts he appointed in May to direct the process of this clarity agreement will soon present his conclusions so that they can then be debated by sectors of the citizenry.
