“Job done”. The satisfaction of the Junts negotiating team for the agreement with the PSOE for the constitution of the Congress is nothing more than a full stop. “It went well”, they admit, and the pragmatic ranks of the party they celebrate having given utility to Junts’ votes, even if it is at the cost of living weeks of uncertainty due to the blackout imposed by Carles Puigdemont and Jordi Turull.
ERC and Junts have deployed parallel channels of negotiation with their own rules of the game that the PSOE is complying with to the letter. On paper, the pro-independence parties don’t negotiate, but the post-convergent silence arouses curiosity and suspicion in their home and in the one next door. What is the logic of Waterloo? Negotiate or take the situation to the limit in search of electoral income in Catalonia in a repeat electoral scenario? “Together it has not returned to the cleda”, is the message of the former president. He does not answer to the Junts executive, but he does not hide either. He plans to attend an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Pau Casals on Monday at the abbey of Sant Miquel de Cuixà, with Pere Aragonès, Jordi Pujol, José Montilla and Quim Torra.
Puigdemont wanted to take responsibility for the Junts negotiation in the first person and set his conditions: discretion and cash payment. The end result, they claim in their team, has gone beyond the socialist starting point for this first assault. It is the first time that the PSOE sits with Junts with the need to get their votes. Until now Félix Bolaños had avoided Míriam Nogueras in Congress. And what there has been is a hand to hand of direct messages, without microphones or leaks. Can we talk about trust? The rules of the game have simply been set and fulfilled.
And the game begins with the post-convergents momentarily parking the binomial “self-determination and amnesty” and turning the use of Catalan in Congress and recognition in Europe into proof of political life. From the first contact, the PSOE has been told that if the importance of the claim is not understood, there is no point in continuing to negotiate. The terms of the agreement evolve during the trading days. First about the name: explicitly “Catalan” and only Catalan. Nothing Valencian. For Junts, the unity of the academically recognized language apart from political decisions is inescapable. The Balearic Islands assume it, Valencia established Valencian as a co-official language in its Statute. And with Junts ruling out an official languages ??law, the manner in which the Spanish Government’s official request to the Council of the European Union to include Catalan among the EU’s languages ??is also conditioned. It is specifically requested to be part of the agenda of the European Council of General Affairs on September 19 in Brussels, although an attempt was made to convince Junts to leave it for the meeting on the 27th and 28th in Murcia This council meeting is “informal”…
The letter signed by the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and registered in the early hours of Thursday morning gives the green light to Junts votes. When it is formally announced and as it is, it is also part of the pact with the PSOE: exactly after the vote that makes Francina Armengol president of Congress. The express meeting of the executive confirms that Puigdemont and Turull work with free hands and the party holds together in silence. At least in public. And so it is intended to continue during the second round of negotiations.
Now ERC puts on the table conditions from the point of view of “reasonableness and exigency”: dialogue table, transfer of Rodalies, reduction of the fiscal deficit and amnesty. And together, they are silent once more. For Puigdemont, this is not an ordinary legislature negotiation. If the political conflict is not addressed from the outset, there is no legislature on which to address sectoral issues. The demand for amnesty was left for the second round, although ERC has tried to put itself in the lead. The penultimate offer of the PSOE in the negotiation of the Table surprised the Republican negotiators at midnight during the dinner. There were no references to the new ways of dejudicialization that ERC claimed.
The morning was used to search for a periphrasis that arrived early in the morning and that was relayed during the succession of telematic meetings until at 8.30 a.m. the seven deputies were informed. Political concreteness is now the reason for the new negotiation. ERC cannot waive the amnesty law. The “effects” of an amnesty were already proclaimed and exhibited with the repeal of the crime of sedition and the reform of embezzlement.
For the management of ERC, the feeling is bittersweet with the final result of the first assault. Three and a half years of negotiations have not yielded electoral results, hundreds of thousands of votes have been lost on 28-M and 23-J, and the important achievements – pardons and reform of the Penal Code – have not been claimed when it touched or have been partially neutralized by the courts. Presuming now that Junts is added to the negotiation path is still a bitter victory. Since Thursday, ERC has claimed its commitment to dialogue as “the only way” as a success. “The foundations laid by ERC have made the current situation possible”, in which, with independence in full swing, the PSOE assumes that it must address the political conflict, they say. On Thursday, Gabriel Rufián saw the agreement with the PSOE almost as historic and the question to ERC is whether working hand in hand with Junts “we would have gotten more”. “They didn’t want to”.
In Junts they reply that the strategies are not compatible and the mistrust is felt even in the calls for unity that are staged, such as that of Oriol Junqueras. The unviability of the pro-independence common front is not new and will continue, at the very least, until after the future of the legislature is resolved, and after Junts and ERC are counted again in a Catalan election.
