Cordiality, normalcy and a lot to negotiate are the emblems of the almost three hours of meeting that starred yesterday the acting vice-president and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, and the former president of the Generalitat and Junts MEP, Carles Puigdemont, as part of Sumar’s initiatives to ease the way to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez at the head of a progressive coalition government. At the end of the meeting, both issued a joint statement in which they describe the meeting as “fruitful” and trust that it will allow “establishing a normalized and stable relationship between the two political formations” for the future legislature.
The meeting, prepared with discretion and tact between the two formations for weeks, was communicated to Moncloa just a few hours before it took place and publicly announced by a press release from Sumar, early yesterday, and called the media in Brussels to take pictures of the meeting. Despite the length of the meeting, the images were a fundamental part of what was agreed, because although during these last five years several members of the executive have maintained indirect and direct contacts with Puigdemont -among them, former vice-president Pablo Iglesias-, they always ‘they had refused to make them official with an image of institutional normalcy like the one played yesterday by the leader of Sumar and that Puigdemont longed for.
“We share the deep conviction that politics must be done from dialogue and democratic principles. In this sense, we agree to explore all democratic solutions to unblock the political conflict”, informed the two parties at the end of the meeting: “Political problems must return to political channels, to find solutions based on dialogue “. “Democracy consists of dialogue between different positions”, they conclude, in an implicit defense that takes place with 24 hours left for Puigdemont to announce, also in Brussels, what his conditions will be for supporting the investiture as president of the government of the socialist leader, Pedro Sánchez.
The meeting began at twelve noon and ended at ten minutes before three in the afternoon. Puigdemont and Díaz had arrived at the same time, accompanied by former councilor and MEP Toni Comín and the leader of Sumar in Catalonia, Jaume Asens, who has acted as a mediator with Junts since Díaz entrusted him with this task the day after the elections on 23 J.
All four arrived at the same time and spoke cordially for a few minutes in front of the cameras before beginning their meeting behind closed doors. “Everyone is talking to everyone”, commented Sumar sources shortly before the appointment, which did not have an exact planned duration: “We do not set deadlines, it is a very important meeting for both parties”. On leaving, the former president did not react to the questions of the reporters waiting at the door, but Díaz did say that the meeting had gone “very well”. “Clear” that there will be more meetings between the two, added the vice president.
The ex-president did comment on the meeting on his account on the X social network – formerly Twitter – to frame it within “normalcy”: “Dialogue and maintaining political relations between formations of different ideologies should not be a surprise, nor any exceptionality”. The meeting, the first of a public nature between a member of the Spanish Government and the leader of JxCat – there have been many discreet conversations over the past five years – since Puigdemont took up residence in Belgium in 2017 after the declaration of independence, took place in the working room of the Eurochamber.
Regarding this meeting, Moncloa sources demarcated the Government and assured that the vice-president went to Brussels on behalf of Sumar, and that in no case does she represent the PSOE or the coalition Executive itself. According to these sources, Moncloa was not informed until Sunday late at night, as a “fait accompli”. “Nothing has been agreed”, they point out from Moncloa. “Nothing to do with us”, they concluded.
Sources from Sumar, for their part, pointed out that “this is another step in our determined commitment to open a new era of solutions based on dialogue and democracy” and remember that “we said this since we were born, during the whole campaign, and we reaffirm it now: we are the ones who think of solutions for the next decade, which is why this must be a legislature of social and plurinational progress, and we have set to work”. The same sources point out that, as democrats, “we respect the public and develop conversations with total transparency, as do the interlocutors of each formation”. In Sumar, in any case, they celebrated the speech of President Pedro Sánchez yesterday at the Ateneo breakfasts, to the extent that, although he did not allude to the meeting, he did offer the context to which he responds: the of a legislature that must be the one of dialogue that puts an end to the Catalan political conflict. Sumar insists that, despite Moncloa’s messages and the PP’s angry protest, “everyone is talking to everyone, even though some are hiding”. The allusion was directed, more than to its partner in Government, to the PP: its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, explained last week that Junts is a “valid interlocutor” to try to get his investiture as president and the contacts he has together are intense.
The truth is that the negotiations between Sumar and Junts began much earlier and were substantial in concretizing the support of the Catalan groups for the formation of the Congress Bureau, on August 17, when the Executive promoted the use of the co-official languages ??both in the Congress of Deputies and in the European institutions. It is no coincidence that the initiative to reform the rules of Congress to enable the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician came from the multi-national group of Sumar and was publicly announced two weeks earlier, on August 2, when it was already in the dialogue between Yolanda Díaz and Carles Puigdemont is underway.
