PSOE gestures towards Junts have increased since the last meeting in Switzerland. The first was the activation of the commissions of inquiry initiated, with the desire of the Ministry of Defense to declassify the CNI documents on the Las Ramblas attack. Then came the pressure to use Catalan in European institutions and also within the working group studying the transfer of skills in immigration matters. And now there are even bilateral negotiations on the path to stability with the Ministry of Finance. All this in just one week and with the aim of winning back Carles Puigdemont’s party for the cause of a parliamentary majority that manages to move budgets forward.
During this meeting in Switzerland last week, led by Puigdemont himself and the organizing secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, a crack opened to be able to restore the collaboration of the seven deputies of the Junts after weeks of clashes and in the midst of a crisis. rain of crossed reproaches. But the first step before entering into future negotiations, the former president warned, should be to comply with what has been signed so far.
Because non-compliance with what has been agreed is the most common criticism that Catalan separatists address to the PSOE. And it also delves into the feeling of annoyance with which they witness the fact that, almost a year after the inauguration pact, Pedro Sánchez is president of the government with their votes, Salvador Illa is president of the Generalitat with the collaboration of ERC and, Meanwhile, Carles Puigdemont continues without benefiting from the amnesty and without his strategy of cooperation with the Executive having given him any political influence on the governability of Catalonia.
“We have acceded,” they emphasize to the PSOE in reference to the main demand of Junts regarding the inauguration of Sánchez, an amnesty law already in force today and which represents a political challenge in the socialist ranks. “The toad we ate with the amnesty is not small. And we committed it and executed it. It is at the BOE and is already benefiting many people. We always comply, but Puigdemont will understand that the PSOE believes in the separation of powers. We can disagree with what the Supreme Court says, but we are not the PP,” they argue in Ferraz Street about the former president’s complaints about his judicial situation, which the party and the government ignore .
Beyond the amnesty, a good part of the discussion between the Puigdemont and Cerdán teams during last Friday’s meeting revolved around the degree of respect for all the commitments acquired last year. From those who signed to make Francina Armengol president of Congress to those who agreed to execute the anti-crisis decrees, including the inauguration pacts themselves. And in summary, Junts considers that almost everything has not been achieved, which the socialists categorically refute.
Catalan in Brussels and immigration powers
This week and for the first time in 19 years, Catalan was heard within the European Union. It was the Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, who took advantage of his presence at the EU Competitiveness Council to speak in his “mother tongue”. Although the question of co-official status is put on the back burner due to the reluctance shown by certain Member States (and unanimity is required), this gesture represents an additional nod from the executive to the independence forces. Catalan.
Among other things, the PSOE has committed to the Junts to introduce the use of co-official languages such as Catalan, Basque or Galician both in the Congress of Deputies and in the European institutions in exchange for the vote in favor of the Armengol presidency. . In the Lower House, its application was immediate, but in Brussels, the question is not yet resolved. But after the meeting in Switzerland, the government tried to give it new impetus.
In a letter sent to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares stressed that this was a “priority issue” for Spain and an “essential element of the ‘Spanish identity’. And he asked him to inform the Council of the European Parliament about the streamlining of the administrative agreement signed years ago to allow the use of these co-official languages in the institution.
Junts also criticizes the fact that no movement has been made so far regarding the delegation of powers in matters of immigration, an issue to which those of Carles Puigdemont attach great importance. The PSOE was forced to engage in this transfer at the start of the legislature in order to be able to implement a set of anti-crisis measures in Congress “in extremis”. The socialists reject that this commitment has been forgotten in a drawer and insist on the fact that they will respect “everything that is signed”, even if in this specific case they allege the legal complexity of the agreement and recall that it exists work teams with periodic meetings on the subject. .
Concretely, a delegation from Junts, led by lawyer and former advisor Frances Homs, has been meeting periodically for weeks with a team from Elma Saiz’s Ministry of Migration led by the Secretary of State in charge of the branch, Pilar Cancela. The conversations, conducted so far in complete secrecy, focus on specific aspects of immigration management that can be delegated, even if the government rejects the idea of a global transfer of skills involving aspects that fall under the Ministry of the Interior, such as controlling the border or the return policy.
“There is room to do it. There are questions that the autonomous communities, those closest to the citizen, can carry out normally”, they emphasize from the ministry, where they prefer not to detail the content of these negotiations, even if they emphasize that what is there discussed occurs “always within the framework of the Constitution.”
Las Ramblas attacks and Operation Catalunya
Of all the nods of the past week, the most immediate was the activation of congressional commissions of inquiry into pro-independence forces on the 2017 Barcelona attacks and the so-called “Operation Catalunya.” During the meeting in Switzerland, Junts representatives gave as an example of non-respect the fact that the two committees had been in a parliamentary vacuum since last February. At the PSOE, we remember that the commitment made in both cases was to activate them in September. And as if by magic, the two commissions saw their work accelerate in record time.
Both in the case of the commission on terrorist attacks and in that of alleged corruption in the Ministry of the Interior, the parliamentary work has already been approved, and in the latter there is even a list of people appearing. Among others, we will mention Mariano Rajoy, María Dolores de Cospedal and Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.
Although no one in the ranks of the government or the PSOE dares to take for granted that the conversations with Junts will result in a budget agreement, the reality is that Moncloa and Ferraz have given the order to dedicate themselves to obtaining it. And this week’s stages have already given rise to very specific spaces for negotiation.
In order to move forward on these accounts, the Ministry of Finance is already negotiating bilaterally with Junts a revision of the path to stability which was overturned in July in Congress by the vote against the PP, Vox and the seven Puigdemont deputies. This path should have been voted on in the second round last Thursday, but the government decided to withdraw its salary at the last minute in order to be able to negotiate it with the Catalan separatists.
Concerning these negotiations, the versions of the two sides also clash. They say in Junts that no one from the Treasury or the PSOE tried to negotiate the path to stability, considered the preamble of the budgets, and that is why they voted against. What they deny from the socialist ranks, where they point out that before the summer, both the team of María Jesús Montero and Ferraz Street itself tried to contact the parliamentary spokesperson, Míriam Nogueras, and the response was negative.
To accelerate the support options of the seven deputies of the Junts, the Treasury is already negotiating with them their favorable vote. And in government, we know that any possibility of agreement requires an upward revision of the margin that this path offers to the Autonomous Communities to the detriment of the municipalities or the State itself. The requests for distribution by thirds in equal shares, proposed by the separatists, are categorically rejected by the Executive, which considers that it is an “unviable” request, even from a technical point of view.
In government, it is believed that the room for negotiation on the way forward is narrow, but that it exists. And the incentive could not be greater: the approval of the general state budgets which ensure the stability of the legislative power and support the ambition of Pedro Sánchez for a mandate until 2027.
