Between suspending and breaking up there is a short – or long – distance that Junts currently has no intention of traveling. Puigdemont’s men are masters of threatening and not giving, an expression that in politics has a strong charge because it implies a strategy of apparent threat that never quite bears fruit. There we are in the relationship between socialists and former convergents. That’s the point of a legislature that hasn’t come together since it started. And there it is, in a constant oh!, a right wing eager for a quick fracture between investiture partners so that everything blows up, and Pedro Sánchez leaves Moncloa.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s wishes to promote a motion of censure, which he made explicit again this week in a radio interview, will have to wait because Junts, unlike the president of the conservatives, in that sense has not moved from where it always was. , which is in no. On the other hand, the PP is no longer reluctant to agree/agree/vote with those who a few months ago considered susceptible to illegalization, in addition to being the perpetrators of a crime of terrorism and another of treason against Spain. True things! Feijóo, like Sánchez, like Felipe González or any political leader, also changes his mind and no one blames him. Well, yes: Ayuso, who is the one who usually poisons her dreams.
But, what we were going for. Everything continues as before. With contradictory messages such as that of Puigdemont who in the same appearance announced that he was suspending negotiations with the Government and demanded a new meeting in Switzerland to continue negotiating. And with signs of tense calm and availability for agreement like those issued by Moncloa in the face of the tiquitaca of its unpredictable partners.
With all the drama or scenographic grandiloquence that everyone wants to add to Puigdemont’s appearance last Friday, the only explicit thing it leaves is that the Waterloo man does not break with Sánchez. Government and Junts need each other and they both know it. So beyond the threats, everything remains in what monarchical jargon usually calls “a temporary cessation of coexistence.” But, only in Parliament, since in Switzerland they can continue cohabiting.
The demand that the negotiating table be convened in Switzerland only shows that there is a will to continue the relationship. At Ferraz they have already gotten to work. In fact, the Secretary of Organization, Santos Cerdán, has been crossing dates with the former honorable molt for days on their respective agendas so that the meeting can be held as soon as possible, report socialist sources, who admit their willingness to accelerate the meeting. The last one took place before Christmas and negotiators usually meet every month and a half.
So, in the short term and no matter how hard Feijóo tries, Puigdemont will not bring down Sánchez because the application of the amnesty and the appeals of the PP and Vox before the Constitutional Court of the law are pending and because he will vote for a motion of censure with Vox It takes away positions in a Catalonia where support for the PP and Feijóo is conspicuous by its absence.
All this happens after the Congress Board decided last Thursday to postpone the controversial decision of whether or not to let the proposal of the convergent parties be processed to urge Pedro Sánchez to submit to a motion of confidence and Puigdemont met with his Executive and decided suspend parliamentary support for the socialists. January is a non-working month in Parliament and by February, the socialists hope to have advanced, if not closed, the pending files with their partners in such a way that this controversial initiative on the question of trust “can fall on deaf ears.”
“The hallmark of the Government is always reaching agreements. When we reach agreements with different political forces different from ours, we comply. Some of the agreements we have reached with Junts are already in the Official State Gazette and others are under negotiation. When there is any discrepancy, our formula is dialogue. Our country needs to move forward,” said Justice Minister Félix Bolaños on Friday after Puigdemont’s appearance. Not making any decision at the Table on the issue of trust means, for the Junts leader, that the PSOE has understood that slamming the door on Junts, as they had announced from the Moncloa, “was not a good idea and they have rectified it.”
Immigration transfers and Catalan in Europe
The reality is that the socialists know that they need the seven Junts deputies to move the legislature forward and approve any initiative in Congress, and not just the General State Budgets for this year, which seem increasingly difficult to approve, if not each and every one of the laws. Hence, all their efforts are directed at redirecting the relationship and, above all, at advancing the negotiation to transfer migration powers to Catalonia – a measure committed by the PSOE a year ago and that for the moment remains unresolved – and the official status of Catalan in Europe. The Government has tried on several occasions to reactivate this last issue in the EU, despite the fact that progress in the community club is complicated given that making these languages official requires the unanimity of the 27 and the reluctance of several countries is persistent. The official status of Catalan in the EU was one of the commitments of the socialists with the pro-independence forces during the investiture negotiations in the summer of 2023.
We are, therefore, facing a dead time that exasperates the right and that, legislatively, means not being able to approve a single initiative in the Congress of Deputies. Until when? Namely. In any case, those who promote the idea that everything happens because a genuflecting Sánchez goes to Waterloo to be photographed with Puigdemont are wrong. The solution is not through that. In fact, the leader of Junts has disassociated his current position from the fact that the meeting with the President of the Government took place. One thing is the “political amnesty” which is what the neo-convergents understand to be recognizing them as political interlocutors – something that happens daily – and another is that everything is stopped waiting for Sánchez to meet with the former president of the Generalitat. That appointment will have Salvador Illa as the protagonist rather than Sánchez.
Until then, Junts does not have in its near horizon to present the motion of censure proposed in the terms of “changing one government for another.” In this sense, Puigdemont believes that when a government loses the majority in a Parliament, “it makes no sense for it to continue governing” and the logical thing is for it to call elections without any motion of censure. In other words: with Vox, not even to collect an inheritance. In Catalonia, which is the framework in which the independence movement operates, it would not be easy to explain an alliance, even temporary, with the extreme right, even if the nationalist right has embraced some of its approaches, such as immigration.
In summary, what for some, Puigdemont’s latest feint with which to suspend support for the PSOE is nothing more than “methadone for the drug dealer”, for others it only demonstrates that Junts needs to continue to assert its seven votes in the Congress of Deputies. because, without the institutional power of the Generalitat, the councils and hundreds of city councils, it is the only space in which politics can be carried out.
This, of course, is the minute and result of the exact time we are in because with Puigdemont you never know. Someone who believes that the Generalitat has been taken from him by Salvador Illa, with the complicity of ERC and the consent of Sánchez, is capable of one thing and the opposite. For example, announcing with all solemnity that it is suspending support while demanding dialogue. One more: make the Republicans the center of all his criticism and meet with Oriol Junqueras to talk about the unity of the independence movement as if nothing had happened in that space in recent times. That image suited both of them because of the consensus that part of their respective electorates demand, but nothing is what it seems. In fact, there are those among Republicans who believe that the appointment with Puigdemont de Junqueras “subtracts more than it adds”, although in the end “the process” and “hypocrisy” prevailed. It’s politics, friends.
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