In the complex negotiations for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, every day has its work. The negotiating team of Junts per Catalunya, headed by former president Carles Puigdemont, has indicated to the PSOE that the vote of its seven deputies in Congress will be affirmative or negative, and that in any case they rule out abstention, as La Vanguardia has learned. .
Thus, without the abstention of JxCat as part of the arithmetic of the investiture, the possibility that the only deputy that the Canarian Coalition has in the Lower House, Cristina Valido, will vote in favor of the investiture to downplay the importance of Junts and that a yes from the post-convergents is not necessary. In this sense, the Canary Islands president, Fernando Clavijo, had spoken out this Thursday, pointing to this scenario so that Puigdemont’s men could become a “secondary actor.”
In fact, in the vote for the Congressional Board on August 17, with an agreement already sealed, Junts ruled in favor of the presidency of the socialist Francina Armengol without hesitation in the first vote, without abstention and without gestures.
The negotiation between post-convergents and socialists is not free of tug-of-war and complications. To the opinions against the amnesty that come from various sectors – the PP demonstration, the words of the CEOE or the spokesperson of the Spanish bishops, among others – or from the old socialist guard – Felipe González, Alfonso Guerra, Juan Carlos Ibarra …–, we must add other issues such as the Junts and Esquerra resolution regarding a referendum that the Parliament of Catalonia approved last week, although in the Catalan Chamber the climate was in no way one of rupture of the negotiations or nothing like that and everything happened completely normally, although in Madrid the reading was not like that. In any case, Sánchez has slammed the door on the referendum.
Added to all this is the inclusion of Salvador Illa as a key figure in relation to the Catalan portfolio and the image projected yesterday with the meeting of the first secretary of the PSC and the acting president of the Government and leader of the PSOE in Ferraz. Both Puigdemont and the general secretary of JxCat, Jordi Turull, have expressed this morning their distrust of the leader of the Catalan socialists due to what happened in Barcelona a few months ago in the constitution of the municipal plenary session and the election of the mayor, Jaume Collboni, which at the last moment agreed with the commons of Ada Colau and the popular of Daniel Sirera.
“It seems to me that giving prominence to the person who deceived Junts the day before the pact of shame in Barcelona to prevent Xavier Trias from being mayor is a very strange way of showing us that they are trustworthy,” Turull said in a message on the social network X, formerly Twitter. In turn, Puigdemont has also expressed his distrust in the same sense as the general secretary of JxCat and has supported his position. “Jordi Turull does well to remember the reasons why Salvador Illa can never be a valid interlocutor to generate trust,” said the now MEP. In the post-convergent ranks, beyond his own maneuver, he resented what they consider to be a deception by the socialists.
In parallel to the negotiations, the Consell de la República, the pro-independence entity chaired by Puigdemont, plans to consult its associates about Sánchez’s investiture and the possibility of promoting the blockade in the Cortes Generales. The vote will be taken after one of them has requested it and 1% of the members have endorsed it, as stipulated in the Consell regulations.
In any case, sources consulted indicate that what the organization’s associates decide will not be binding for Junts and argue that the result will be the mere positioning of one more entity, such as the one the Catalan National Assembly or Òmnium Cultural may have. These sources also recall that a vote was already taken in the summer on encouraging abstention in the general elections and that option was ruled out.
