The 1-O has gone from being a coup to a creation of a few. Esteban González Pons, deputy general secretary of the PP, pulled a veil over the process on Wednesday to affirm that “Junts is a parliamentary group that, beyond the actions that four, five, ten people carry out, represents a party with a tradition and a legality that is not in doubt”. Such courtship had not been seen since 27 years ago José María Aznar assured that in privacy, “in small circles” he speaks Catalan. The two facts have one thing in common: they needed the support of CiU (then) and Junts (today) to invest their candidate for the presidency of the Spanish Government. Necessity sharpens forgetfulness.
The PP is knocking on a door, that of Carles Puigdemont, which must be varnished the same and in the same color as the one in 1996. That year José María Aznar and Jordi Pujol agreed for the popular to rule in Spain. It was the Majestic pact. There were important counterparts that the popular fulfilled in just two years.
This door does not have the same initials. Together is not Convergence, but it is its heir. The entry into the key of the negotiations of Jordi Turull and Laura Borràs – the agreement for the Congress Table is the first example – has opened the eyes of the PP to try to get closer to them. A possible investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo depends, at least, on the abstention of Junts.
But Junts demands amnesty and the right to self-determination. With these ingredients it is unlikely that Feijóo will compromise and repeat a deal with Majestic. Not even on the part of JxCat for less – it is one of the “155” parties – and no matter how much in the pro-independence formation there are sectors that bet on returning the fish to the cave.
The PP looks at the history of relations with CiU, CDC or PDECat. It can even draw similarities between 1996 and today: the PP made CiU pay for the broken dishes for the support of a PSOE that dragged the scandal of the GALs or the wiretapping of the Cesid (former CNI), but ended up compliments to Pujol after the elections; in the same way, the PP has demonized Junts and ERC for a decade because of the process and today it pats them on the back.
Pujol’s support was rewarded. In 1999, he repeated presidency of the Generalitat thanks to the PP. But Aznar’s absolute majority in 2000 implied a distancing that still lasts today. However, the closest thing to a break as such did not occur until 2012, and in the framework of Catalan politics. In October 2006, Artur Mas signed in front of a notary public his commitment not to agree with Josep Piqué’s PP after the Catalan elections on Wednesday 1 November. The PP had already presented its appeal of unconstitutionality against the Statute.
José Montilla, from the PSC, won the presidency of the Generalitat. In addition, the commitment had small print: it limited the scope in Catalonia and left the doors open to CiU to do what it considered in Madrid.
Be that as it may, the PP veto in Catalonia did not last long and in 2010 he broke with the notary. In 2011, Mas agreed the budgets of the Generalitat for that same year and those for 2012 with Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, then president of the PP in Catalonia. The economic crisis gave arguments to the government to apply particularly significant cuts to Health.
History repeated itself in Congress. CiU approved Rajoy’s cuts. Also a decree of the Moncloa for a labor reform in March 2012 that enshrined the “dismissal without cause”.
The breakup was rather gradual. At the end of 2012 CiU embraced sovereignty and Mas demanded a fiscal pact from Rajoy. He came away empty-handed and the Catalan president called elections. His new government depended on ERC, which demanded that CiU abandon relations with the PP. However, there were exceptions. The rupture was not yet translated into the local world, for example. The convergent Xavier Trias, mayor of Barcelona from 2011 to 2015, reached agreements until the last year with the leader of the PP in the city, Alberto Fernández Díaz, who endorsed a city model that, example, liquidated the suspension of hotel licenses in Ciutat Vella.
It is true that CiU opposed Rajoy’s investiture in 2011, but it was not forceful. “We would have liked very much to abstain, but we had no other option”, said Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida, who, although he was in the ranks of Unió, served as CiU’s spokesman in Congress. However, the PP alone had an absolute majority and did not need any support to invest its candidate.
Beyond. In 2016, Convergència had already stopped working hand in hand with Unió, and, in the midst of the pro-independence process, the Convergents facilitated with their abstention the control of the PP Congress Bureau, which was chaired by Ana Pastor.
Until the irruption of González Pons on Wednesday, bringing iron to the role of Junts in the process, the good words of the PP to the converging world and to Catalanism in general had been forgotten. The last glimpse of sympathy was in 2002, when Aznar tried to recite a poem by Gimferrer in Catalan: “And we don’t even live from signs: from the sound of signs, not the life of the word, but the skin of the sound. The understanding of the world in the shadow of words”. It was a disaster.
