Pedro Sánchez only has one arithmetic to cling to if he intends to renew the presidency of the Government. This inevitably passes through the Catalan and Basque independentists. For ERC, the situation is fully favorable to toughen demands and even assume that some will not be able to decline. One of them, an amnesty law that today the Republican spokesperson Raquel Sans has taken for granted. “The framework of the negotiation involves amnesty, self-determination and the well-being of citizens, an amnesty that will be possible thanks to the work done by Esquerra during the last legislature,” Sans stated during the press conference this afternoon.
According to the Republicans, the almost four years of dialogue and negotiation with the PSOE are what have allowed the amnesty to be possible today. The pardons, the repeal of the crime of sedition from the Penal Code or the black-on-white recognition by the Moncloa of the existence of “a political conflict between the State and Catalonia” have paved the way for this purpose.
In any case, Raquel Sans wanted to emphasize, as the president of ERC expressed in an interview in La Vanguardia, that the amnesty is not an end point, but rather the starting point to advance the other major axis of the demands of the republicans: self-determination.
In this context, it must be taken into account that groups of jurists close to the PSOE government and Sumar -currently in office- have already begun to design a text on the amnesty that fits into the Constitution.
ERC is now waiting for the demands that Carles Puigdemont can announce tomorrow. The former presidents of the Generalitat will give a conference in Brussels. There he will dot the i’s. Two representatives of the Republicans will be present in the room of the European Parliament: Teresa Jordà and Francesc-Marc Álvaro. Junts has issued invitations to the Junqueras party without this implying any kind of coordination between the two pro-independence groups. Sans has not ruled out that his representatives may end up meeting privately with Puigdemont at the end of the conference.
The hy press conference has also served to affirm that, after some hesitation, ERC will be present at the Onze de Setembre demonstration that is mainly organized by the Catalan National Assembly (ANC). So will Pere Aragonès, who announced it this morning in an interview on TV3.
