It was nothing new. In October of last year, the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont already explained in a text on his social networks that “PSOE people”, among other interlocutors, visited him to give him “expectations of good treatment, via reform of the Penal Code, and a pardon”. Those statements made in the middle of the debate on the repeal of sedition already had their impact and the PP accused the Government of Pedro Sánchez of sending emissaries to Waterloo. “Who is the new Mr. X of the PSOE who went to see Puigdemont?” asked his general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, to the head of the Executive in Congress. Two days later Sánchez denied the biggest: “The answer is very simple: no.”
But Puigdemont reopened Pandora’s box yesterday a few hours after the start of the electoral campaign in an interview on the El Món program to RAC1, reiterating that people linked to the PSOE contacted him “more than once” in the Eurochamber to explore the possibility of obtaining a pardon like the ones that the Executive granted to the prisoners of 1-O. A possibility that, as he recalled, he has always rejected because he is not looking for a “personal solution” to his situation but “a solution to the conflict” between Catalonia and the Spanish State. “I will never turn myself in or be offered to spend just one month in jail,” he settled, to later demand amnesty, which, in his opinion, “is not the solution, but it is a necessary condition to negotiate.”
The PP did not need more to try to ignite the electoral campaign and, through some statements by Cuca Gamarra sent to the media, he declared a “hidden pact” revealed, which is also the “hidden program” with which the leader of the PSOE He wants to “remain in Moncloa” at the head of a “new Frankenstein Government” for which he is “willing to pardon Puigdemont”.
The general secretary of the PP wondered if offering pardon was the way in which Sánchez intended to bring Puigdemont to Spain and recalled that “that is not what he committed to with the Spanish.” The PP took the opportunity to demand that Puigdemont render accounts before the courts with Alberto Núñez Feijóo as president of the Government, because, he assured, his candidate “is not willing to pardon him.”
On the part of the Government, the person in charge of rejecting the accusations was the Minister of Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda, Raquel Sánchez. “I want to flatly deny these statements, that is false, absolutely false,” said the Catalan minister, who framed the former president’s statements in his “total lack of credibility” while showing his surprise at the “alignment” of the pro-independence leader “with the Popular Party” within a “strategy of generating lies and hoaxes” against the Executive.
