Under the cloak of the holidays, which covers everything, the pieces of the political chessboard move. The official story is that there will be nothing until after the constitution of the Cortes Generales on August 17, but the limits of the playing field have been explored and delimited in recent days.
The pro-independence forces, which are one of the key pieces for the inauguration of Pedro Sánchez and for the configuration of Congress -especially Junts-, however, shield themselves and wait for a formal proposal to reach them before getting wet. Hence, day in and day out they also urge the socialist candidate, who spends these days in Morocco with his family, to be the one who takes the initiative.
But PSOE emissaries these days have carefully sounded out actors and the JxCat environment with proposals that encompass the economic and judicial spheres, according to sources consulted. But there is nothing official on the table and the instruction decreed in the post-convergent formation, after a call for calm, is that there be “discretion” and silence around the negotiation. The management requests it and Carles Puigdemont claimed it, who is now the one who leads the baton in this game despite lacking organic positions.
“We do not have any official proposal, neither content nor interlocutors”, point out sources of the formation. “There are pigeon messages that reach many people, but that and nothing is the same,” add these sources, who recall that “silence and maximum discretion” have been imposed when it comes to matters.
Pere Aragonès spoke along a similar line on Tuesday when taking stock of the political course. “Many ideas and proposals will come out. Some will talk about financing, others about the FLA –Autonomous Liquidity Fund– and about infrastructures”, said the president when asked about a possible cancellation of the Generalitat’s debt with the FLA or about the possibility of Catalan management in the El Prat airport. “Until a negotiation is on track, and the first person who has to move is Pedro Sánchez, I will not be able to pronounce myself on specific aspects that today are more part of speculation than reality,” he added.
Junts is the hardest nut to crack in the investiture equation, no matter how much Esquerra insists that they have the same deputies as his ex-partner –seven– and that yesterday Marta Rovira warned that “no one can take the ERC votes for granted” for the investiture. For this reason, the PSOE has transferred to the post-convergent some proposals to convince them.
In the judicial folder, the measures are an express law to be able to renew the General Council of the Judiciary – expired five years ago – without needing the Popular Party and include in the governing body of judges people proposed by JxCat, for a hand, and, on the other, to seek the effects of the amnesty with reforms in the Penal Code that are intended to leave on paper the cases related to the process, also those that are settled in the Court of Accounts.
Likewise, it is considered shielding the Catalan language in education, after some court rulings require 25% of teaching hours in Spanish.
On the economic level, the possibility is offered for Catalonia to have its own tax agency with more capacity than the current one and an update of the regional financing model –which expired nine years ago– which implies a substantial improvement in the resources it receives, some 3,000 million Euros more per year than at present. In any case, not much more has been done to avoid agitating the territorial barons of the PP.
To all this, if the general State budget for the next year is approved, compliance with the third additional provision of the Statute could be added, according to which investment in Catalonia must be made in accordance with the GDP it represents in Spain as a whole. .
This package of measures would be well received by some leaders of the more pragmatic sector of training, who want to use the position of strength that Junts now has in Congress.
In any case, Puigdemont is in the engine room, and he made it clear over the weekend that he wanted to limit the negotiation to the political conflict and assessed that the rest is to put “patches on the legislature.” Yesterday, after a new sentence that obliges 25% of the classes to be given in Spanish in a school, he asserted that Catalan “regresses pushed by the official offensive of the State.” “They are deconstructing social and political consensus for mere linguistic supremacy, and they still ask that they continue to issue blank checks because ‘the right must be stopped,'” he opined. “You cannot repeat this scheme if you want to have different results,” concluded the former president.
In ERC the bet is to maintain the dialogue table to be able to advance along the path already traveled in the last legislature. But they know that achieving a referendum is far away and they want tangible issues such as reducing the fiscal deficit or a transfer of resources and infrastructure to Rodalies. Regarding financing, the Government’s idea is to negotiate bilaterally with the government and try to obtain more resources.
