“We will not allow any deviation from the constitutional order, whether active or passive”, warned yesterday the first vice-president of the central government and deputy general secretary of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero, in the face of Esquerra’s renewed commitment to a self-determination referendum or Junts’ manifest purpose of completing the 2017 process.
Montero stressed to RNE that Junts and ERC “must be clear that the PSOE will not allow any limit to be crossed”. “And the Executive will ensure, as now, strict compliance with the constitutional order”. This is demonstrated, as he pointed out, by the appeal before the Constitutional Court that the Council of Ministers approved the day before against the decision of the Bureau of the Parliament to admit a popular legislative initiative to declare the independence of Catalonia.
“We will not do what Rajoy’s government did, to look the other way in the face of these situations and let things come and go, as if they had the ability to turn off by themselves,” he said. ·legate Montero This position of the former president of the PP government, the socialist leader recalled, led to a unilateral declaration of independence and the holding of illegal referendums. Montero defended, instead, the “ability to intervene at key moments” of the current Executive. “We will not allow any departure from the constitutional order, and the pro-independence parties know this,” he warned.
The calling of the 12-M elections opened a hiatus in the negotiations and agreements of the central government and the PSOE with the Generalitat, with the ERC and with Junts, in which each of these actors entrenched themselves in their positions and he reaffirms his goals for the appointment with the polls, amid mutual accusations of overacting.
It was the reproach that the spokeswoman for the Generalitat, Patrícia Plaja, also made, after the Council of Ministers approved on Tuesday to contest the decision of the Bureau of the Parliament that gave the go-ahead to the processing of the independence initiative. “The Executive has learned little or nothing from the last few years”, lamented Plaja.
“It is others who have to learn that there are roads that lead nowhere”, Montero retorted yesterday. A “quite general” conclusion of everything that has been experienced in the last decade in Catalonia, he pointed out, is that “you cannot create an expectation that does not have instruments or means to achieve it, just as you cannot embark many people in a process that ends nowhere”. “It was a road to nowhere”, he insisted, which only led to “confrontation between the Catalans”.
Everyone should have already learned the lessons that the process left, he assured. “But when this does not happen, it is necessary to teach where the limits are”, he concluded.
Six weeks before the appointment with the ballot boxes in Catalonia, the vice-president pointed out that “during the electoral campaigns there are many parties that overact, especially those that have a more complicated story about what their road map is for the future”. And he indicated that the pro-independence formations “hold on to issues and situations that I hope the voters in Catalonia will definitely leave behind”. “This era is behind us and now we must aim towards the future, with everyone, even with the parties that do not share the constitutional order, incorporated into the institutions and political dynamics”, he conceded.
Montero defended the “firm will” of Pedro Sánchez to move towards “concord, reconciliation, coexistence and normalization in Catalonia”, with the pardons or amnesty that allow “to close this page in Catalonia and open a process of hope” to face the “real problems” of Catalans.
For this reason, he opted for Salvador Illa, who “has the best prognoses” for the 12-M. “Hopefully we will not only be the list with the most votes, which everything points to this, but also with enough of a majority to allow us to govern”. Montero confided.
