Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont will meet in the same building for the first time since the former is President of the Government and the latter is a MEP. It will be in today’s session of the plenary session of the European Parliament, which is being held this week in Strasbourg. The last public image of both in the same place is from August 2017, in tribute to the victims of the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils. The day before they had had lunch together discreetly, as it turned out later, and in March 2016 when the independence leader was president and Sánchez was general secretary of the PSOE in his first stage, Puigdemont received the socialist leader at the Palau de la Generalitat.
Whatever happens today, the presence of both in the same place has a lot of political connotation due to the message that is projected, whether or not there is a greeting, photo or meeting. The image of both leaders is already relevant in itself, but at the moment in which it occurs, just after Junts per Catalunya has given support to the re-election of the PSOE leader as President of the Government, less than a month ago, and The holding on December 2 of the first meeting of the negotiation space between JxCat and the socialists in Geneva with an international mediation and verification team, causes political tension to rise in the European Parliament.
The head of the central Executive will take stock this morning of the rotating Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union in this last semester. He will do it starting at 10:30 a.m. He will intervene first and then the leaders of the European Chamber groups will intervene, although other members of the Community Chamber may also intervene for a short period of time. It is at that moment when there is the possibility that Puigdemont could address the head of the central Executive. After the appearances of the groups and any MEP who has asked to speak, the socialist leader will have a turn to respond. Late yesterday it was still unknown who will speak, but it is certain that Junts will speak.
Before speaking before the parliamentarians, Sánchez plans to meet with the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metzola, and afterwards there is no planned attention to the media in the European Parliament. In the afternoon the head of the central Executive will go to Brussels for a European Union-Western Balkans summit and will remain in the Belgian capital until Friday for the European Council meeting.
Normally, the presidents of the Council of the EU appear at the beginning of the semester of the rotating presidency, but in the case of Spain, the early elections on July 23 and the situation of the acting Government have caused Sánchez to appear in Strasbourg at the end of the mandate. His first intervention was scheduled in July and was canceled after complaints from the popular, since his intervention would have been in the middle of the electoral campaign.
The other date that was considered was September, but the President of the Government also declined to go to the European Parliament since the investiture debate of the PP candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who was not elected, was already on the agenda.
In principle, no meeting is planned between the two leaders, Sánchez and Puigdemont, according to Government sources, but they do coincide in the hallways and they would greet each other normally and act with the same elegance, courtesy and respect as with any other. as pointed out yesterday from the Moncloa. In turn, the vice president and spokesman for Junts, Josep Rius, one of the people closest to the former president, also pointed out that no meeting is scheduled between the president of the Government and the former president, despite the fact that the relationship between the posconvergents and the socialists has changed substantially in recent months, since last spring, when contact was resumed and especially after the general elections of July 23. “I am not aware that a meeting is planned. I am not aware that it is planned,” the post-convergent deputy said yesterday in a television interview. “They will coincide in the same physical space, no one denies this, after many years,” Rius added.
There is a similar precedent to the one that will take place this Wednesday in the Strasbourg chamber. In the constituent session of the legislature that began in the spring of 2019 and ended just a few months later with the electoral repetition in November of that year, Sánchez and Oriol Junqueras, who was then in preventive detention awaiting the Supreme Court but was able to attend to the Congress of Deputies, greeted each other in the Lower House for a moment.
Thus, today’s session takes place one day after the Congress of Deputies processed the amnesty bill proposed by the PSOE, the result of the negotiation with JxCat and ERC for the investiture of Sánchez, and it became clear that Catalan will not be an official language in the European institutions during the Spanish rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, although this had been planned and agreed. In any case, this last issue does not seem to have soured relations between the socialists and the post-convergents. The latter are confident that the matter will come forward sooner or later and Spain assures that it has already addressed Belgium so that the matter remains on the agenda and continues to be addressed in the EU general affairs council. The Belgians will hold the rotating presidency starting in January and will be able to influence the agenda of the meetings of that body that must approve the official status of Catalan in Europe.
Regarding today’s speech, Moncloa sources indicated yesterday that the head of the central Executive will focus his intervention on the files closed during the Spanish presidency, such as the regulation on artificial intelligence that was approved just a few days ago or the raw materials law, as well as issues that have been closed in the last six months. Also included in the bag of achievements at the European level are the summit between Europe and the States of Latin America and the Caribbean (Celac) in July, that of the European Political Community of Granada with the presence of the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, or the European Council in the Nasrid city that was “strategic” for the future of the EU, as emphasized by the Moncloa.
What was not clarified is whether the president will make reference to the amnesty law that is being processed in the Lower House, although it is expected that the Spanish opposition will use the issue in its responses. “It will be a repetition of the debate a few weeks ago on the amnesty,” predicts an MEP.
What is clear is that the context has changed. The last time Sánchez went to the European Parliament, in January 2019, in the debate on the Future of Europe, sovereignist MEPs welcomed him with signs denouncing the imprisonment of the leaders of the process and the situation of expatriates. Puigdemont was not yet a European parliamentarian, so he did not attend a debate that also took place in Strasbourg. Be that as it may, this time it is not expected that there will be protest posters.
