It will not be water from May, but from July, but Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès seek to promote, with a face-to-face meeting on the 15th of this month in Moncloa, a dialogue that allows them to straighten out their legislatures. Both are interested in relations thawing before their mandates drain the cup of bitterness.
The President of the Government needs to recover the alliance with ERC and the investiture to renew State budgets that cushion runaway inflation and a recession that different economic environments predict. That the accounts remain in borage water could further stimulate the differences in the polls between PSOE and PP, with Alberto Núñez Feijóo leading them.
On the other side, Aragonès and Esquerra pivot their entire political strategy on a negotiation and a dialogue with the State that for now does not shine. A tangible result of the dialogue table with which he can raise his chest without hesitation would help the formation of Oriol Junqueras to face the municipal elections of May 2023 with greater guarantees. The table will be convened twice before the end of 2022, without ruling out that the first one may be this July.
The Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, and his counterpart in the Generalitat, Laura Vilagrà, sealed the date of the meeting of presidents yesterday at the Palau de la Generalitat for just after the debate on the state of the nation. They also set foot to advance in “dejudicialization” (central idea of ??the upcoming negotiations) and the recovery of trust. They agreed to it yesterday in a document that has to serve to “strengthen the negotiation.” But it will have to be Sánchez and Aragonès who prepare the mold so that words become deeds. That is, State budgets for 2023 and advances against “repression”, against the background of numerous cases in the investigating courts 13 and 18 of Barcelona and in the TSJC for 1-O, which may involve prison sentences for charges independentists.
In Moncloa they consider that with the agreement the Generalitat assumes the solutions within the law and that the polarization of positions is also overcome. This is so because work will be done to achieve meeting points, they say, that are representative of a broad and transversal social majority, so that the majority of Catalan society, and not just a part, must be represented.
The appointment between presidents will come three months after the espionage with Pegasus in the independence environment was uncovered.
Be that as it may, the document signed by the Ministry of the Presidency and the ministry led by Bolaños ratifies the recognition of a political “conflict” that must be resolved politically. The guarantees of non-repetition of espionage to restore the dialogue that the Government has demanded so much are implicitly written in point eight: “The actions of the institutions will guarantee fundamental rights, privacy (…) in Catalonia, at all times, rejecting illegitimate acts, decisions or mechanisms”.
But, Bolaños and Vilagrà did not agree on the diagnosis of the meeting and whether it implied a normalization of relations. While the minister assured that the document “certifies the stability and solidity of institutional political relations between the two governments”, Vilagrà considered the opposite: “While we still have on the table the possibility that there will be disqualifications, that they spy on us, that there are people who can go to prison, it is obvious that relations are not normalized”.
