The contacts between the PSOE and ERC are discreet, but both actors do not avoid from time to time acknowledging in public that they are holding conversations. Quite the opposite of the conversations between the socialists and Junts, which do not come to light due to the express desire of the post-convergents. Today, the president of Esquerra Republicana, Oriol Junqueras, engaged in a telephone conversation for just over half an hour with the acting president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, within the framework of the negotiations ahead of the investiture. The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has stated from Bologna (Italy) – where today he meets with the president of the Italian region of Emilia Romagna, Stefano Bonaccini – that the talk “is nothing more than the normalization of what should be “normal”, taking into account, furthermore, that Sánchez is at risk for re-election.
The exchange of views took place a few hours before the leader of the PSOE met with Gabriel Rufián in Congress. Félix Bolaños, Minister of the Presidency, was present in the same room. The spokesman for the Republicans in Congress has limited a possible agreement to the investiture and puts any legislative agreement on hold. The general budgets of 2024 “are another game”, he stressed.
“It would be an act of divination to presume that to invest a socialist president you have to support the budgets,” Rufián insisted. In any case, Rufián has appeared at the meeting with the three demands of recent weeks: amnesty, self-determination and well-being of citizens. “They are demanding but reasonable conditions,” he considered. “They are more about the country than about the party,” because “they transcend our acronyms and practically everyone in Catalonia can be in favor,” he added.
Rufián has thought that the conversation between Sánchez and Junqueras is “good and healthy.” Little has emerged from it, but according to ERC, Junqueras has communicated to Sánchez “the need to move forward in the negotiation of the main demands” that the Republicans have been presenting for weeks with a view to an eventual investiture. They are the same ones that Rufián has raised face to face with Sánchez: amnesty, self-determination and well-being of citizens. In this last folder, the Republicans focus on the comprehensive transfer of the Rodalies train service and ending the fiscal deficit.
Patxi López, spokesperson for the PSOE, has appeared after Gabriel Rufián. The socialist has made it clear that the self-determination folder is not even going to be opened: “From minute one we have said that socialists are not going to travel down paths that lead to division and rupture.” That the leaders of the PSOE and ERC have spoken by phone is, for López, a sign that the negotiation is moving forward.
The phone conversation comes as Republicans have been warning for weeks not to take their support for the inauguration for granted. In fact, when almost all the attention of the negotiation is focused on the relationship that Junts may maintain with the PSOE and its demands regarding a possible amnesty, ERC already takes it for granted and is upping the ante – unlike JxCat – by placing table the need to also make commitments to advance the issue of self-determination. Something that could translate into resuming the dialogue table to resolve the political conflict recognized between both parties and that has not met since July of last year.
In any case, in the contact this morning, according to ERC, its president has valued the relationship that his party and the PSOE maintained in the last legislature, with the repeal of sedition and pardons as maximum exponents, in addition to ” the importance of advances in political and social terms”.
For their part, socialist sources assure that their leader has appreciated the support provided by ERC during the last legislature and has agreed with Junqueras in highlighting “the political and social advances” that have occurred during that time. “He has also outlined his project for the next four years and the need to reach an agreement on progress and stability for this period,” states the PSOE.
“Both leaders have positively valued the conversation as a sign of cordiality and mutual respect, and as one more step towards political normality,” Esquerra says in a statement, in which he points out that the talks will continue through the respective negotiating teams. . At this point it is worth remembering that the president of the Esquerra parliamentary group in the Parliament, Josep Maria Jové, met privately in Barcelona on Friday with the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños.
