The map of agreements that the results of 28-M left behind is becoming clearer. Beyond those that are still sealed in the municipalities, two important ones were closed yesterday, those of the councils of Lleida and Tarragona. The PSC and ERC have closed two agreements in these supra-municipal bodies and the common pro-independence front that President Pere Aragonès raised 24 hours after the meeting with the polls has made some progress, if it had not already done so.
The two agreements will allow ERC to preside over the two deputations despite the fact that Junts was the first force in the two bodies and, although in Lleida the pact is defined and distributed up to the fourth vice-presidency, in the case of Tarragona it is not yet it has spun so thin. There, ERC’s agreement with the Socialists has opened a “war”.
ERC justifies the agreements and criticizes “pacts of betrayal” of the post-convergents with the PSC in several municipalities. There are examples: Roses, Cunit, Dosrius… Agreements that have made the republicans pay with the same currency, even though this means definitively burying the pro-independence front’s own proposal.
Sources familiar with the negotiations in Lleida point out that the pact was made possible by “weaving territorial complicities” and acknowledge the role of ERC’s interlocutor, Montserrat Fornells, Member of Parliament and mayoress of Vilanova de l’Aguda. The pact, “with discretion”, has been woven for two weeks and the Unitat d’Aran (UA) and Pacte Local (PDECat) participated in it, which obtained a representative in the deputation which has been crucial. In this way, the ERC retains the presidency, the PSC gets the first vice-presidency; the Republicans, the second; UA, the third, and Pacte Local, the fourth.
On the other hand Junts, which was the first force in Lleida, see it as “a declaration of war and disloyalty”. And they have the same opinion about what happened in Tarragona. In this deputation, the socialists proposed to the post-convergents an agreement in which they dispensed with the presidency, but it was former president Carles Puigdmont who stopped him to try to reach an agreement with ERC. It was then that the PSC activated the agreement with the Republicans, which ended up being signed on Friday.
According to republican sources, at the table of the Geneva meeting with Junts two weeks ago they proposed a division of the presidency of two years for each party. Junts assures, for his part, that they communicated that proposal last week. The versions contradict themselves when it comes to apportioning the blame.
It is necessary to take into account the large number of small mayors that the post-convergents have in the province of Tarragona. And in the direction of the party they feel “stabbed” by ERC.
With the agreement reached in the Diputació de Girona between the two pro-independence parties, the new pacts set aside the reissue of the pact between socialists and post-convergents in the Diputació de Barcelona. At the PSC they have never hidden that they would like to repeat, but at Junts they were waiting for events before sealing it. A matter of hours.
