The meeting between President Pere Aragonès and the leadership of Junts per Catalunya to try to find joint agreements with a view to the general elections ended yesterday with higher-than-expected progress expectations. After a one-hour meeting, the president of JxCat, Laura Borrà s, explained that both delegations are summoned to work on the various proposals to try to lock this common articulation. Proposals ranging from the unitary list advocated by the post-convergents, to the “common front” of the Republicans.
In the morning, both Aragonès, in the control session, and Oriol Junqueras, in a press conference, had ruled out the possibility of attending the generals in a joint list.
It does not mean that this specific scenario changed in the afternoon meeting between the president and Borrà s, Jordi Turull and Albert Batet, but rather that what changed was the tone and forms. “We wanted to emphasize the need to try to block this opportunity in a Catalan key, in a pro-independence key, and thus also regain confidence in the face of the Catalan legislature,” Borrà s said.
From the Government – ​​the meeting was also attended by Minister Laura Vilagrà – a “positive†assessment was made of the meetings –as a whole– that the president held throughout the day. He met with ERC, comunes, CUP and Junts, and today PDECat will do so, all of which are considered to be able to build “a democratic front” to “strengthen the country in the face of the threat from the right and the extreme right.”
In this way, the negotiations will continue and will give rise to days of tactical movements as a result of the unexpected electoral advance announced by Pedro Sánchez. And that in the control session yesterday in the Parliament, the idea of ​​Aragonès did not seem to have support. The president tried to explain his idea, mismatched by his party’s veto of a unitary electoral list, in the manner of Junts pel SÃ, and found nothing but reluctance. Junts reviewed in plenary session the multiple recent disagreements, from the rupture of the Government –including the dismissal of Vice President Puigneró–, going through the negotiation with the Government to reform the Penal Code to the frustrated pro-independence strategic coordination in Congress.
The CUP did not fall short by ignoring a “last-minute” proposal from the president, in his opinion thought “more to hit the ballot and the result of bad electoral results.” After the meeting with the president, the deputy Eulà lia Reguant censured that “it cannot be expected that in a month and a half what has not been done in two years will be solved.”
And the commoners were the first to meet with Aragonès, but Jéssica Albiach already made it clear to him in public that he could not count on her: “With Junts, not even on the corner,” he settled.
It was Oriol Junqueras who was in charge of clarifying the president’s proposal. To begin with, not to mention a single list: “We do not share proposals from the past that have shown their limits,” settled the president of ERC. On the other hand, it opened the ban on braiding “minimum programmatic agreements” ahead of the July elections in areas such as “the defense of the Catalan language and the Catalan school, the end of repression or the defense of the democratic principle, the right to self-determination and amnestyâ€.
Junqueras also threw a hook at the post-convergents by ensuring that ERC will prioritize the independence pacts in the municipalities after the elections on Sunday, thus offering their support for Xavier Trias to take over the mayoralty of Barcelona.
ERC fights against the demobilization of its voters, which on Sunday caused it to lose 300,000 votes in Catalonia. The plebiscite package that the July elections have acquired, with the PSOE-PP dilemma, poses a new threat to the party. Faced with the dichotomy, ERC may receive a new setback at the polls while Junts capitalizes on the independence vote with a mobilized electorate, as was seen on 28-M. The idea of ​​the “democratic front” was born to avoid diluting the parliamentary weight of the Republicans in Madrid.
In the Government they assure that Aragonès launched his proposal “very coordinated with the party”. Hopeful, they argued that the initiative responded to the need to act: “Without doing anything we would not encourage people” to vote.
