Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont agree but do not understand each other. They need international advisers, so no one should be surprised that, after facilitating the investiture, the former president has drawn scenarios for a break with the PSOE and exposes them without objection to Manfred Weber himself. From disruptive to disruptive. From revolutionary to Green Deal Killer, according to Político’s definition. The PP criticizes that the Socialists meet with Puigdemont while their European battering ram against amnesty allows themselves to be surprised by the former president at the Museum of the Cinquantenary in Brussels with unusual motions of censure and votes of punishment.
Puigdemont has been in the European capital for six years and almost four as an MEP, but he had only exchanged distant greetings with Weber. The former president was the “refugee” for the PP (and the PSOE). Now, he is a kingmaker and, as Weber longs for the day when Alberto Núñez Feijóo is president, Puigdemont throws the bait of a union between Junts and the PP, justified if Sánchez does not fulfill the pacts. The excess of gesticulation leads Puigdemont, according to Político, to compare the reference to lawfare in his pact with the PSOE with “the head of the horse in El Padrí, it is a warning that we are serious”.
This casual conversation is the preamble to the meeting between Junts negotiators and the PSOE with the presence of international advisers. In Las 50 leyes del poder en El Padrino, the Chilean sociologist Alberto Mayol maintains that you should “distrust mediators, they usually have a side”, but for Puigdemont and Sánchez they are the way to keep alive a political understanding that starts with a pact on discrepancies. Another thing is the feasibility of three parallel negotiation tables and if the international advisers, mediators and verifiers involved in the process do not end up unanimously recommending the unification of the debates and the definition of the objective: whether to save the legislature or solve the Catalan political conflict?
The Henry Dunant Center for Humanitarian Dialogue is one of the advisers in the PSOE’s negotiations with Junts and ERC. This entity not only mediated the negotiation for the end of ETA, but has been in contact with the pro-independence parties since Sánchez and Quim Torra signed the Pedralbes declaration in 2018. In fact, even the summary of the case Tsunami that instructs judge Manuel García-Castellón at the National Court reveals the existence of a Signal group with the presence of Marta Rovira and Josep Alay in which contacts with the entity were addressed under the ‘HD acronym and euphemistic references to Harley-Davidson, according to El Mundo. Together he abandoned the game of dialogue to fuel the “intelligent confrontation” and has now resumed contact with the center to involve him in the new stage of the party after 23-J.
The confidentiality contract under which these types of organizations work does not allow confirmation of their intervention, but in the extension of the negotiation with ERC there are more organizations in the portfolio. In fact, Marta Rovira cited the Berghof foundation, the Swisspeace Institute and the Geneva Center for Security Policy a few days ago. It is likely that one of them will also be at the table between Republicans and Socialists. To the proliferation of external consultancies is added the disparity of interlocutors, including the PSOE, since Santos Cerdán is the man for Junts, while ERC interacts with Minister Félix Bolaños, although it remains to be seen whether he participates in the first meeting of the table with ERC scheduled in Geneva with Marta Rovira. The meeting will be placed on the calendar around Sánchez’s appointment with Pere Aragonès on the 21st at the Palau de la Generalitat.
For now, the Republicans have ceded the media spotlight to Junts with the pretense of demonstrating their strategic turn. To the chagrin of the international advisers, they all have two electoral appointments in mind, the European elections in June 2024, with Puigdemont as candidate, and the Catalan elections scheduled for February 2025. The fruit of the Junts and ERC negotiation tables will be the terrain of battle of the pro-independence parties. “Let’s get serious”, they say.
