Sumar experienced a small storm in a glass yesterday, when the candidate of the commons Aina Vidal ratified in Sabadell the well-known position of the political space on a self-determination consultation in Catalonia. “In the referendum we are where we have always been: Catalonia must vote for its future. It will form part of our electoral program”.
Vidal did not specify that such consultation be included in the program within the term of the legislature. In fact, what will appear in Sumar’s program for the next four years is the submission of the agreements of the Catalan roundtable to an endorsement by the Catalans, a process that has not only defended the new coalition, but also formed part of of the joint positions of the coalition government of PSOE and Unidas Podemos.
President Pedro Sánchez himself has referred to this specifically on several occasions: what is agreed at the table must be ratified in a consultation.
Sources from En Comú Podem pointed out yesterday that “in the specific case of this legislature, we will have on the program the proposal for a consultation for the ratification of an agreement between Catalonia and the rest of Spain that arises from the dialogue table”, and they emphasized that the amputations practiced by the Constitutional Court to the Statute of Catalonia, approved by the Parliament and by the Cortes, mean that “we are governed by a rule of self-government that has not been voted on by the citizens nor is it the result of an agreement between governments, for That is why it is important that the new political demands are incorporated into a new political agreement that is democratically validated”.
Since the events of October 2017 and before, since the political declaration of Zaragoza, signed in the public office assembly organized by Pablo Iglesias and Xavier Domènech in September, the space of Unidas Podemos has always defended the holding of a consultation as the final objective of self-determination, although they reject that it can be convened unilaterally, and have always promoted an agreement in this regard between the central governments and the Generalitat.
In the electoral campaign of the 2017 Catalan elections, weeks after October 1, the commons proposed a “law of clarity” – in the manner of the one approved in Canada in 2000 to decide the political status of Quebec (Loi sur la clarté référendaire) – that establishes a framework of mutual recognition and specific rules for holding the consultation. The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonés, endorsed this proposal in the general policy debate of the Parliament last autumn, despite the fact that at the time Esquerra did not support the proposal of the commons.
