He processes It has a date of birth: September 20, 2012. The PP Government’s slamming of the door on the fiscal pact requested by President Artur Mas gave rise to the idea that there was only the option of a unilateral attack, especially after the ruling of the Constitutional Court on the Statute. But also, since last Thursday, there is a death date. The 14 votes of Junts and ERC for Pedro Sánchez in exchange for the amnesty have consummated the turn that enthrones the constitutional framework as the only possible one to solve the political conflict. The race until the next Catalan elections, in 2025, will be the winter palace for parties that do not renounce their ideology but face the great doubt of how an electorate, already demobilized, will digest the change of level and the fear of new competitors emerging.
The preamble to the amnesty law that the PSOE cooked up at separate tables with Junts and ERC certifies the change in nature of what until now had marked the processes, although the substance of the conflict remains unresolved. “The goals to be pursued within the constitutional framework are plural. However, all paths must travel within the national and international legal system,” says a text full of references to the Constitution. It is not the only movement. Junts, the main critic of ERC’s approach to the socialists since the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, is now also aiming to explore the possibilities of a dialogue where the only palpable difference to what was done by the Republicans is the figure of an international verifier.
The struggle between the possibilist strategy of ERC and the confrontational one of Junts has conditioned the last five years in Catalan politics. But both parties insist that they do not renounce “any way” to achieve their goal and take refuge in elements that are more rhetorical than effective. At his conference in Brussels, Carles Puigdemont himself warned Sánchez in September that if he sought Junts as a partner he would have to accept that it was a party that would never rule out unilateralism “as a legitimate resource to assert its rights.” The general secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, assured last week on TV3 that his party was responsible for “more than half” of the text, without clarifying whether it also implied accepting good approaches that were until recently considered heretical in the neo-convergent party. .
“ERC played music four years ago and everyone is now dancing to it,” ERC spokesperson Gabriel Rufián snapped at his Junts counterpart, Míriam Nogueras, in his speech last Thursday in the investiture debate. . It was not only a welcome to dialogue, but also to the republican digestion of what happened in 2017. Already in the elections of 21-D, called by 155, while Junts saw a mandate in the illegal referendum of 1-O , the ERC program raised the flag of “bilateral negotiation” and they put aside the unilateral route when they realized that there was neither the citizen force sustained over time nor the international recognition to defend it.
Pedagogical work for ERC and Junts
The dependence of the PSOE on the two pro-independence formations is frightening in certain sectors, who remember how the fierce competition between Junts and ERC shook the investiture agreement on several occasions. And nothing suggests that day-to-day parliamentary life is immune to the same dynamic. However, as long as there are dialogue forums set up and the foreseeable legal struggle for amnesty is managed, everyone will continue to be in the same boat and the tone of confrontation does not seem to have much of a fit. Tied at seven seats each, everything seems to indicate that at the moment in Congress the priority is for each one to organize their house: ERC works to assume that it is no longer arbitrating Sánchez’s steps alone and Junts focuses on reinforcing a vaporous story of the intransigent partner.
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“At this moment the independence movement has more strength in Madrid than in Catalonia. And this worries me a lot,” Artur Mas said last Friday in an interview with TV-3. The former president thus put his finger on the fact that ERC, Junts and CUP have 73 deputies in the Parliament, far exceeding the absolute majority of 68 but without real impact either at the sectoral level or at the national ambition. The latest barometer of the Catalan CIS, also released last week, even warns that this majority sustained over time is for the first time in danger of not being repeated, something that would open the door for the PSC to reach the Palau.
![President Pere Aragonès during the inauguration of a treatment plant in Rubí, on Friday.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/r1LP7TmmaYtmc-fYS03cfHaiJhU=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/EAOHAO3T5JE3FOFN7HXMV5JAJE.jpg)
The independence unity is not expected. Even now there are those in Junts who insist on the idea that ERC has given up on its independence commitment – that idea was the focus of the debate on the breakup of the Government, in 2022 – and there are those who directly mock the fact that the Republicans defend that it is possible to “expand the “independence base” raising the flag of dialogue. But now those same criticisms are being leveled at Puigdemont and his followers, and coming from previously related sectors. “It is bad that those who had maintained the banner of resistance against the repressive policy of the State towards the independence movement have finally thought that it was worth giving their votes to invest a Spanish president,” lamented MEP Clara Ponsatí, last Friday. , in an interview with RNE.
The one who was Minister of Education during 1-O and who fled with Puigdemont to Brussels to avoid responding to Spanish justice also offered to lend a hand in the creation of “new political tools” that would allow “the independence movement” to be relaunched. Rhetoric goes as far as it goes and Junts can no longer monopolize the clear defense of unilaterality. ERC has been years ahead in the process of getting its electorate to understand its changes and now it is Junts who has to go through that ordeal. In last week’s internal consultation on the agreements, the yes vote was won with 86% of the votes of the participants (67% of the census), but almost 14% were against.
With an uncertain electoral potential, it is that space that Ponsatí wants to reach. But she’s not the only one interested. The Catalan National Assembly (ANC) has also raised its hand, which does not give up its idea of presenting its own civic lists. “If the parties do not achieve independence, we are determined to do it ourselves, using elections, and with new actors if necessary,” claimed the president of the entity during the last Diada, Dolors Feliu. The ANC, with a divided leadership, sees the betrayal of Junts and ERC as the moment to implement its plan. The xenophobic party Aliança Catalana is also waiting in the chapel. The visible face of her, the mayor of Ripoll, Sílvia Orriols, sees it possible to capitalize on the social and national disenchantment in her favor and is already maneuvering to create a territorial network that supports her.
Fall of the independence movement
But with the independence unit dancing for a few seats, a new candidacy that gains support but does not prevail can radically change the result. Those of Puigdemont, for example, still remember the 77,000 votes that the party from which they split, the PDeCAT, obtained in the Catalan elections of 2021… If there had been a neo-convergent coalition, Junts would have maintained primacy in the independence bloc and the story would be very different.
But the ghost that really haunts the analysis and perspective meetings of republicans and joints is another one. In the municipal elections, 300,000 pro-independence voters stayed at home or voted for other parties, and on June 26 that number doubled. The demobilization of that electorate generates great concern. ERC currently wants to bet on selling its management. A discourse until now demonized as “autonomist”. But the Generalitat, with a budget of more than 41,000 million euros and more than 360 positions of trust (with an average salary of 84,000 euros, councilors included), could seem like a mere winter palace, but it is much more than that.
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