The negotiations between the PSOE and ERC, which seem to be facing the final stretch towards the investiture, are discreet but not secret – as they have been so far with Junts – and yesterday, taking into account the strategy and interests of the parties, the two parties jointly communicated the existence of a morning call of a little more than half an hour between the acting president, Pedro Sánchez, and the president of Esquerra, Oriol Junqueras.
They had the talk barely a few hours before Sánchez’s meeting with the parliamentary spokesman of the Republican group, Gabriel Rufián, to refine the investiture negotiation. Rufián was optimistic about the negotiation but denied the PSOE the much-sought candy of stability: “We are not negotiating a legislature, we are negotiating the vote for an investiture. And the vote of Esquerra sweats”, he repeated three times.
Both the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, from Bologna (Italy), and the parliamentary spokesman repeated that the telephone conversation between Sánchez and Junqueras “is nothing more than the normalization of what should be normal” and avoided giving more significance, but the precedents point to the opposite: that this call, mutual recognition of interlocutors and legitimacy, is substantial for the agreement. “A show of cordiality and mutual respect, and another step towards political normality”.
Junqueras, according to ERC, highlighted the relationship that his party and the PSOE maintained in the previous legislature, with the repeal of sedition and pardons as the highest exponents, in addition to “the importance of the advances in a political key and social”, while the president of the Spanish Government insisted on the need for an “agreement on progress and stability for this period”.
It should be remembered that the president of the parliamentary group of the Left in Parliament, Josep Maria Jové, met privately on Friday in Barcelona with the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños. For the Republicans, the agreement is far away, despite the fact that the Sánchez-Junqueras call may suggest otherwise. “Without progress in self-determination, there is no pact”, they warn from the party. Resuming the dialogue table seems, however, to be sufficient.
Rufián met with Sánchez in the company of Félix Bolaños, Minister of the Presidency. When he left the meeting, Rufián was not cool with the possibility of an agreement, quite the opposite, but he was with regard to the possibility of the republican yes going a centimeter beyond the investiture session. Not even for the impending general budgets of 2024.
Yes, he was specific with regard to the three demands – “the three folders” – of the last few weeks: amnesty, self-determination and the well-being of citizens, although this time, in the allusion to the consultation, he avoid the term “referendum” and was careful to use language very close to that of President Sánchez himself, so that he affirmed that the political solution for Catalonia “must be voted on”. Nor was he a fetishist regarding the amnesty and spoke of “reparation” of what has happened after 1-O.
Regarding the “folder” of social progress, with the subtitle of “improving people’s lives”, the Republicans insist on the integral transfer of the Regional train service and correcting the Catalan fiscal deficit, explained Rufián. “They are demanding but reasonable conditions”, he said, “but they are more country than party, because they transcend our acronyms and practically everyone in Catalonia can be in favor”, he explained.
Patxi López, spokesman for the PSOE, appeared in the Congress press room after Gabriel Rufián to make it clear that the self-determination folder will not even be opened: “From the minute we have said that by paths that lead to the division and to we will not go through the rupture, the socialists”. That the leaders of the PSOE and ERC have spoken by phone is, for López, a sign that the negotiation is progressing, but he did not clarify whether Pedro Sánchez will contact Carles Puigdemont directly throughout the negotiation process.
Sánchez’s day of meetings in Congress had opened with his interview with the UPN deputy, Alberto Catalán, who reiterated his refusal, and with the Coalition deputy, Cristina Valido, who ruled out an affirmative vote at the investiture, but he admitted that he is negotiating his possible abstention – despite the fact that arithmetically it is innocuous to the result of the vote, given that Junts only foresees an affirmative or negative vote – in the framework of an agreement for the creation of the single command for to the migration crisis, as well as other issues of the “Canarian agenda and economic affairs”. Valido recalled that, although the CC vote is not necessary during the investiture, it will be during the legislature.
