Carles Puigdemont and Coalició Canària focus attention on the negotiations for the constitution of the Congress Bureau and a hypothetical investiture; meanwhile, ERC has seen how its seven votes are taken for granted in the calculation of the PSOE. The socialists have an interest in adding up to the right-wing bloc, while the republicans reiterate time and time again that their support is not guaranteed, not even for Thursday’s vote.
Discarded the pro-independence common front, Junts and ERC have open parallel negotiation paths in the face of the vote that will form the governing body of Congress and, while the post-convergents remain silent, Marta Rovira explained yesterday some of the political conditions that ERC has put on the PSOE’s table.
The general secretary of ERC reminded that her seven votes will not go to “a Congressional Bureau that has vetoed Catalan, that has not allowed Pegasus’ espionage to be investigated or that has stalled the processing of the amnesty law” . During the last legislature, it was the PSOE who, from the Congress Bureau, facilitated the blocking of these initiatives. Now, the Republicans have announced that the negotiation for the Bureau must include political issues and not just logistics. They did so during last week’s meeting of Teresa Jordà with the Secretary of State for Relations with the Acting Courts, Rafael Simancas, and he was elevated to the socialist negotiating team.
The PSOE intends to refer the political claims to a subsequent negotiation on the investiture, and its strategy is to limit the current contacts to issues of parliamentary logistics: Bureau of the Congress, parliamentary groups, places in the commissions… But ERC needs to add some gain, even if it is partial, to support its dialogue strategy in view of the silence that Junts maintains. The negotiation of the Bureau is the antechamber of the investiture and in ERC they maintain that despite this, or precisely because of this, they must include a political component.
Despite everything, the public message delivered after the meeting by Jordà, spokesperson for the ERC negotiating teams, was a step forward, according to the socialists, pending the position of the PNB, CC and, above all, Junts.
Both ERC and Puigdemont’s party foresee three days of vertigo – “an eternity”, they say – to set a position and determine whether the PSOE-Sumar bloc can gain control of the Congress Bureau, in which Coalició Canària also wants to play his vote and proposes a presidency for a Basque nationalist, as the president of the Canary Islands Government, Fernando Clavijo, explained yesterday in an interview with La Vanguardia.
The contacts to gather support for the re-election of Pedro Sánchez have not started, and the story of ERC is already a victim of the polarization fueled by the PSOE and Junts, with Puigdemont pointed out as the holder of the key to the legislature. The silence of the post-convergents includes the desire not to display this key publicly, but it has become clear that there will be no pro-independence common front and that Junts will maintain its own strategy.
Rovira assured yesterday that ERC prioritizes the “strategic understanding” with Junts. “We do not want to resign due to the joint and necessary force of the 14 pro-independence deputies. We believe that 14, strategically coordinated, outweigh 7 on each side,” he wrote on Twitter. Together, he sees this common front as unviable and alleges, in the first instance, a lack of trust. The post-convergents want to take the opportunity to put an end to what they consider ERC’s “unilateralism” after a legislature in which the Republicans exhibited their 13 deputies in front of the 4 Junts.
