Jorge Valdano once said after a game he lost in the last minute: “I swam across the ocean and drowned in the sand.” A negotiation like the one that has been opened between the two parties in the Government of Spain and Together (or, to be more precise, Carles Puigdemont) is like one of those football matches with an uncertain outcome, in which a bad pass to the last minute or an untimely penalty at the end can thwart all efforts to reach the beach.
The day after Puigdemont’s press conference in a Brussels hotel, where he set out his conditions for Pedro Sánchez’s investiture, the noise was no less than expected. The Barcelona press tries to see the more pragmatic aspects of the appearance and the Madrid press points out that there is no credit card that can pay the former president’s bill. The leader of the PP, after listening to him on television, refused to meet with Junts representatives because the demands of the man from Waterloo are “unacceptable and impossible”. It was quite similar to what Felipe González proclaimed almost at the same time on Onda Cero: “The Constitution does not fit neither amnesty nor self-determination”.
Those who want to see the positive side of Puigdemont’s words value that the demand for amnesty, but not at the start of the self-determination referendum, facilitates the negotiation for Sánchez to repeat. The former Catalan president wants an amnesty law to be approved as a matter of urgency, despite the fact that the Executive is in office. But, although left-wing lawyers have doubts about whether amnesty is compatible with the constitutional framework, they are looking for the formula to make it possible. It is not as easy as preparing a Nespresso, as Puigdemont thinks. What is counterintuitive is to claim an amnesty without renouncing the unilateral path that the leadership of independence condemned.
I don’t know if an optimist is an ill-informed pessimist. But the optimists about Sánchez’s investiture should know that it will be very difficult to cross the sea and reach the beach alive, because sharks smell blood and not all life preservers are approved.
