Pedro Sánchez moderates his media exposure. Amnesty? His response is generosity, concord, forgiveness… “There will be no agreement until everything is agreed.” The negotiation of the amnesty is like the meigas, there are some, and apart from Sumar. Another thing is what it is called, who it affects and how it is justified. What is difficult to fit in now is the added gesture that the independence movement has imposed on itself around self-determination, which ERC and not Junts champions, and which fuels the mobilization of the right this weekend in Barcelona.
Carles Puigdemont has not renounced unilateralism, although, in connivance with the PSOE, he places the focus on other folders without fear of being accused of being a traitor, as custodian of 1-O. But ERC needs to continue the 2019 investiture pact. A moral recognition that they have cleared the path that Junts is now taking, hogging the spotlight and that has placed Puigdemont’s return as a post-convergent victory on the horizon.
Oriol Junqueras asks for “more” and sows concern among the Junts leadership due to the added tension to the negotiation that places them as a first-class political actor. The new flying goal is October 24 for the official status of Catalan in the EU and to establish a verification system for agreements that only include intentions in advance. In ERC they warn that underestimating them by taking their votes for granted is an added risk for the PSOE. So Pere Aragonès insists in public: “Amnesty and self-determination.” And other folders are opened privately to compensate.
During the government of José Montilla, far from self-determinism, an ERC councilor justified himself: “This government determines itself with each of its decisions.” The defense of the right to self-determination is more than normalized in the Parliament’s archive. Before the process, eleven motions or resolutions had been approved that vindicated it, and in 2012 the PSC broke the voting discipline of the PSOE in Congress and defended dialogue “to make it possible to hold a consultation with the citizens of Catalonia to decide about their future.”
Emphasizing the need for dialogue and voting, without specifying the scope of the vote or what happens if there is no agreement, is the recurring formula in the negotiations between the Generalitat and the Government. Pedralbes’ declaration of December 2018 – with Quim Torra – supported an “effective dialogue” in which each party could put forward proposals that should “achieve broad support from Catalan society.” The 2019 investiture pact between ERC and the PSOE established that the agreements of the dialogue table would be subject to “democratic validation through consultation with the citizens of Catalonia”, “in accordance with the mechanisms foreseen or that may be foreseen in the framework of the legal-political system.”
The unusual independence union to condition the investiture on Sánchez working “to make effective the conditions for holding a referendum” angered the PSOE, which privately highlighted how Junts avoided grandiloquence. Puigdemont already ignored the referendum as a requirement and, in the commemoration of 1-O, he had agreed with the pro-independence entities that there would be no references to the negotiation. The ANC president not only went off script, but she called for declaring independence after tying the amnesty. The new standard-bearer of unilateralism two years ago was limited to suggesting that the Parliament propose a reform of the Constitution to simply provoke a debate on the Catalan question.
The “referendum or referendum” was left behind. “The amnesty and something more” involves following the path of the dialogue table and opening the third folder that ERC uses: the transfer of Rodalies, the improvement of financing or oxygenating the budgets of the Generalitat. Discarded after 1-O the viability of unilateralism even among pro-independence voters – only 24% of those from Junts and 14% of those from ERC defend it -, the playing field is marked by words and sensitivities. That’s what Sánchez is in. The results will not be immediate. The negotiation will last until November.
