“Nothing”. No meetings, no exchange of documents. The pro-independence common front between Junts and ERC to negotiate a hypothetical investiture of Pedro Sánchez does not exist or is being forged, quite the opposite. The mistrust between the two formations remains and despite public appeals there has been no progress since 23-J and there is not expected to be any, according to sources familiar with the contacts. The fluid personal relationship between Jordi Turull and Marta Rovira is not synonymous with political rapprochement. “We will not enter into the investiture game with them arm in arm”, they affirm in the post-convergent dome.
Together they are quietly comfortable in the spotlight, while ERC has already made progress in its negotiations with the PSOE for Thursday’s vote in which the Congress Bureau will be constituted. The republicans have publicly stated that they guarantee their vote for the PSOE, whoever the president of the Chamber is, and take it for granted to maintain the parliamentary group and even claim the presidency of some commission. Meanwhile, at Junts, they avoid talking about it, but they do emphasize that ERC’s explicit position does not allow for any negotiations. “So there is no margin”, they conclude.
After 23-J Junts raised the desirability of establishing a common pro-independence strategy and its leaders contacted ERC, the CUP and social entities. However, the aim was not to set a minimum common denominator to sit down to negotiate Sánchez’s investiture, but rather a broader roadmap. According to these sources, there have been no further contacts.
At the Palau de la Generalitat they argued that Junts and ERC had to go hand in hand to avoid PSOE operations through the back door, but the post-convergents maintain that “ERC’s speech goes one way and the facts another”. Facts such as ERC’s refusal to form a joint front in Congress in the past legislature, or ERC’s pacts with the PSC in the deputations of Lleida and Tarragona.
“What we end up doing, we will do directly”, they conclude in Junts. The Republicans, as Teresa Jordà pointed out this week in Congress, are not starting from scratch in the relationship with the PSOE. In fact, the dialogue between the management of ERC and the Catalan Government with the acting minister Félix Bolaños – one of the negotiators of the PSOE – has been common during the past legislature. I Junts does not want to be “an addendum” in this relationship. “We do not know their previous agreements”, they point out.
The Junts dome has made silence a wildcard that allows them to keep all possibilities open. The final goal of the post-convergents is not an investiture of Sánchez and, therefore, they do not consider, as Marta Rovira did say, that rejecting it will have “dire consequences”. Together, they claim to have “free hands” to shape their demand for amnesty and self-determination and consider trust between interlocutors to be “key”. The leaders of Junts always reiterate the “importance and transcendence of the political moment”, and that is why they want to lead it from a place of trust, and “ERC is not”.
In any case, Junts’ position on Thursday in Congress, with or without a parliamentary group, will not mean progress in the investiture negotiations. This “doesn’t come from chairs”, they reiterate. And they insist that the “gestures” of the PSOE, such as providing them with more resources and visibility in the chamber with their own group, will not condition them.
At the moment, Carles Puigdemont and Turull are in charge of curbing speculation about negotiations, offers and demands. These are days of “carrier pigeons”, but there have been no substantive negotiations. The ranks of the party have assumed the leadership’s strategy, first with a certain surprise, and once the silence was consolidated, with a certain respite. The discipline of their public positions has made it possible to avoid the continuous wear and tear of public debate.
However, yesterday Antoni Castellà broke his silence in an interview with Efe in which he challenged Sánchez to negotiate a Catalan-style Brexit if he wanted to be invested. Castellà is a Junts deputy in Parliament and was a candidate for the Senate on 23-J, but post-convergence sources point out that his opinion corresponds to the leader of the Democrats and not to Junts or to the Council for the Republic, an entity chaired by Puigdemont and whose Castilian is the spokesperson. In Junts, silence is maintained.
