The content of the Ramón Tamames (89 years old) speech in the motion of no confidence that will be debated and voted on soon in the Congress of Deputies is one of the main unknowns of this initiative promoted by Vox with the most unlikely objective of throwing the Government out of power. coalition and call elections for May 28. The unprecedented fact that the motion’s candidate is an independent far from active politics and a renowned professor and economist with a very transversal political career could mean that his government program, which he must propose as a candidate for the presidency, does not coincide on many issues with the Vox ideology.
Tamames himself refuses to reveal anything about the content of his speech, which he has been preparing for weeks, but in recent years he has been openly opposed to Pedro Sánchez’s pacts with the independentistas to maintain power, one of the points on which It does coincide not only with the formation of Santiago Abascal but also with other groups in the Chamber such as the PP or Cs. However, in 2017, just after the 1-O referendum, the former Communist Party deputy bet in a letter to the then former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas for recognizing the Catalan Nation as a way of trying to resolve the conflict between Catalonia and Spain. And in 2019, with Sánchez already in La Moncloa, he defended in an interview in La Contra de La Vanguardia a Catalan State within the Kingdom of Spain and the fiscal pact for Catalonia.
Tamames published a book on the process in 2014. Where are you going, Catalonia? How to get out of the independence labyrinth that he reissued with some updates in 2018, including a letter sent to Mas on October 3, the same day of the general strike and King Felipe VI’s speech after the referendum, in which he raised the possibility of “reconsider the new status of Catalonia, and even the new name of the Community as Catalan Nation”, according to what the newspaper El Mundo reveals on Thursday and La Vanguardia has confirmed.
At that time, the professor already acknowledged to his interlocutor that his approach was “very difficult”, but added that “it would be greeted by all as the Great Occasion”. As he explained then, Tamames and Mas sent letters regularly, something that the professor also did with the then Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
“There are already precedents, even if they are very different, of singular names in our political structure, such as the Principality of Asturias, the Foral Community of Navarra, or the Basque Country,” Tamames pointed out in his letter to Mas to justify his proposal for the name of Catalonia and added that in the 1978 Constitution itself, when the word nationality was included, in fact the idea of ??nation was already being announced, which was formulated in the draft Statute of 2006, which should have been considered after the referendum of the Catalan people in 2010″.
In the letter, Tamames revealed that both spoke two weeks before 1-O in the traditional civet of Fonteta (Baix Empordà) organized by the businessman Luis Conde and then they called to speak after the referendum, which, in the professor’s opinion, was not it was “to remember with unanimous joy”. The former deputy admitted that “a high level of confrontation” and “fatigue” for the Catalan question in all of Spanish society, which “has been paying attention to the issue so far never so resonant.” For this reason, he was of the opinion that the time had come to “propose an offer of a possible agreement, to stop a perverse evolution that we could all later regret.”
In a subsequent letter, dated October 9 and just before the then president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont declared independence and instantly suspended it to open the door to a negotiation that never came, Tamames ordered Mas to induce Puigdemont “and his most extremist friends” not to make the unilateral declaration of independence and warned that it would be “a real disaster for everyone, and especially for those who want to proclaim it.” In addition, the professor reminded Mas of a phrase that he had said in the sense that “the banks would fight among themselves to stay in Catalonia in the event of secession” and noted that the forecast was not met with the transfer of headquarters.
Artur Mas’s response, dated the same day 10, recalled that the 2010 Constitutional Court ruling “distanced a good part of the Catalan people from the Constitution” and since then, “the Constitution has been losing legitimacy.” For Mas, according to the letter, the sentence “was loaded, free of charge and unnecessary, the constitutional pact through which the Catalan people -or the Basque, or the Galician- had the last word on their autonomy, via binding referendum” . “And no one has lifted a finger to repair such a mess,” he lamented. Finally, he indicated that “the right to decide is not incompatible with the Constitution itself, according to a sentence not far removed from the Constitutional Court.”
In a new letter dated October 16, Tamames warned Mas of the economic consequences of “crossing the Rubicon” and maintaining the path of independence. “The so-called Republic, which I believe will not be, would be born in the midst of an economic crisis and true chaos, for the purposes of legal security and international connections. You are really playing it, if you allow me to Say in those terms…” And on October 25, when it was speculated that Puigdemont would call elections, the professor encouraged Puigdemont to go to Madrid to appear in the Senate, give up the independence project and call elections. “We are in the decisive hours and, in any case, the President of Catalonia not coming to the Senate would be a very serious omission, with all kinds of conjectures in this regard, which would not benefit an idea of ??understanding favorable to all at a crossroads that is complicated at times,” said Tamames.
On the same day as the DUI and the application of article 155 of the Constitution to Catalonia, Mas sent a letter that Tamames himself understood as a “consumatum est” in which the nationalist leader recounted how Puigdemont offered Moncloa to call regional elections whenever that there were guarantees of non-approval of 155 and recalled the “enormous” political cost assumed by the president for “sense of country and State.” “Moncloa’s response was myopic and base. It is not intended to solve a conflict, it wants to end it. A huge mistake made by bureaucrats with a lot of party sense and very little State mentality.
Before the peak of the process, and even before the sovereignist consultation promoted by Mas on 9-N of 2024, Tamames proposed to both the then president and Rajoy what he called a memorandum with five specific proposals: creation of a Federal Tax Agency , state pooling of the public debt of the Autonomous Communities, interregional solidarity within certain limits (4 per 100 in fiscal balances), location of the Senate in Barcelona, ??creation of the Ministry of Territorial Affairs and location in Barcelona, ??and revision of the Catalan Statute.
After the most critical moments of the process and already with Pedro Sánchez in La Moncloa after the motion of no confidence against Mariano Rajoy and facing new general elections, in April 2019, Tamames, in an interview in La Contra de La Vanguardia called on the Catalans to “return to the path of our magnificent Constitution: it makes possible a Catalan State within the Kingdom of Spain! But to castle in an independent Catalan republic is equivalent to having lost: that will never come!” In the same interview, the professor assured that “Rajoy damaged everyone”. In his opinion, he “should have accepted Mas’ fiscal pact.” And he saw a ray of hope: “There is still time…, if Junqueras borders on secession and, like Tarradellas!, he envisions a Catalonia in Spain”…
