The PSOE leadership assures that, in this legislature, meetings and contacts with Junts per Catalunya will be as regular and constant as with the rest of the parliamentary groups essential to gain a majority for each parliamentary initiative, from ERC to the PNV or EH Bildu. Therefore, in Moncloa and Ferraz they consider that each new meeting they have with Junts should stop being news. But, for now, it still is.
The organization secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, will hold a meeting this Wednesday with the general secretary of JxCat, Jordi Turull, according to socialist sources, which will be held in the Congress of Deputies. A new meeting that they frame, in any case, “within the most absolute normality.”
But the new meeting between Cerdán and Turull will take place after the tensions suffered last week, during the intense negotiation between the PSOE and Junts to achieve parliamentary validation of the first decrees approved by the Government. Once the scare had passed – Junts chose not to vote on the decrees, in exchange for a battery of compensations, including the delegation of powers over immigration to the Generalitat of Catalonia -, the socialists proposed that such votes should not be repeated again. heart attack, so the new appointment between Cerdán and Turull can serve to grease the parliamentary relationship between the PSOE and Junts.
As already happened in the complicated negotiations for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, Cerdán’s role was key in attracting to Carles Puigdemont’s formation the new parliamentary majority that supports the new legislature and that allowed Congress to validate last Wednesday two of the first three decrees approved by the Council of Ministers in this mandate. This was recognized by Turull himself after the intense conversations that both had last week: “In this agreement, if anyone has positive merit, it is Santos Cerdán. Sometimes you find interlocutors with whom you can speak honestly and get down to it,” admitted the general secretary of JxCat. After the meeting that Cerdán and Turull had in Barcelona two weeks ago, last Tuesday both met again at the meeting held in Moncloa by the negotiating delegations of the PSOE and Junts.
In this relationship of trust that, in fits and starts, the PSOE is trying to build with one of its essential allies in this legislature such as Junts – after long years of absolute mistrust and mistrust on both sides -, the personal connection between Cerdán and Turull It is thus presented as a determining factor in reaching new consensus.
The new meeting between Cerdán and Turull, this Wednesday in Congress, was already agreed upon last week during the tense conversations to approve the first Government decrees. Both parties admitted that the situation could not be repeated and that they had to establish a negotiation protocol, which would always keep the communication channels open between the PSOE and Junts, so that no initiative would be proposed, much less decrees, without that there is a prior consensus between both groups. In this sense, the sovereigntist formation already regretted that the Government did not even contact them to obtain their essential support to approve the spending ceiling on which the project of the general budgets of the State for this year 2024 will now be prepared.
