Pedro Sanchez She plans to meet during the Legislative Council not once, not twice, but “several times” with Carles Puigdemont, as the Prime Minister said yesterday in an informal conversation during the Christmas Cup held in Moncloa. Many details of all these appointments have not yet been determined (where, when and with what frequency), but the most important thing for the Socialist leader is the “political normalization” that the meeting with the former President of the State General entails.
Efforts to build bridges will not be directed solely at them together For Catalonia, a party that throughout the last legislature avoided negotiating with the government. It will also extend to ERCwith identical meetings with Oriol Junqueras, within the balances that Sánchez must achieve between the two main formations of Catalan independence, which during this term will be indispensable for the approval of almost any initiative in the Chamber of Deputies.
But something is changing in the circumstances of this leader and another. Puigdemont left Spain in 2017 to avoid court proceedings after a self-determination referendum was held that year, so until the amnesty law comes into effect (it is estimated to be around April) the meeting between Sánchez and the government will take place. The actual leader of the Junts should be detained abroad. Junqueras, on the other hand, went to trial, was found guilty, spent several years in prison, and was later pardoned.
And Madrid from Barcelona
Yesterday, the head of the executive authority avoided clarifying whether this opening meeting, which like subsequent meetings, will be public and will have pictures but not in the presence of the international auditor chosen by the socialists and after the rapprochement to scrutinize the negotiations between the two parties, will take place before the controversial rule is approved. However, sources from La Moncloa explained that the plan, which has not yet been fully determined, is for the meeting to take place once the judicial filing of the process has been made, opening the door to either Madrid or Barcelona.
This will be the first meeting of this kind between Puigdemont and the most responsible person in the government. To date, contact has been made PSOE With the previous president (at least the public) it was led by the party’s organizing secretary, Santos Cerdán, who was the face of the negotiations with Juntes in Brussels, and then, with Sanchez already invested, held a new meeting in Geneva to consider exploring the scene that opened from now on.
As a way to downplay the fact that all these meetings took place in Belgium and Switzerland instead of Spain, socialists insist that they were between parties and not between governments. He added, “This is a very important matter and no one pays attention to it. Some people confuse parties with government institutions. You can understand some criticism when the institutions are, but in this case they are two free political formations sitting in an environment,” the fourth vice president, Maria Jesús Montero, said in an interview with El Periodico newspaper at the beginning of December: “This could allow progress in the country’s future.”
On September 4 when Yolanda Diaz He traveled to Brussels to meet with Puigdemont, and Sánchez’s collaborators distanced themselves from the meeting. They even expressed their resentment toward their fellow coalition partners. “He has nothing to do with us. He is doing this as the leader of Sumar,” Moncloa’s sources said. But then came the inauguration, to which the seven deputies of Gwent went vote In favor of the amnesty law. The newly re-elected Prime Minister now feels more politically empowered to meet with Puigdemont, and at the same time has greater confidence in the subsequent parties’ commitment to negotiations, which in the short term should lead to their support for budgets.
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