“I don’t know exactly when, but I will meet with the leaders of ERC and Junts.” This is how the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, verbalized in public this Monday for the first time, his willingness to meet with Carles Puigdemont, still on the run from Spanish justice and waiting for a resolution on whether or not the amnesty approved by the Congress. An amnesty that Sánchez considers fulfilled despite the fact that the Supreme Court is precisely trying to ensure that it does not benefit Puigdemont. The proof: the recent agreements of the PP with Junts.
This is not the first time that Sánchez has stated his intention to meet with Carles Puigdemont. He said it a year ago in an informal conversation with journalists at the ‘Christmas cup’ that is celebrated around this time at the Moncloa Palace. And he reiterated it at the same event a couple of weeks ago. But he had not said it in front of the cameras in a statement that will now remain for the newspaper archive.
The question to the president expressly referred to whether they would meet before the State Budget for 2025 is approved. Another question asked whether the meeting would take place without Puigdemont pardoned. But Sánchez’s response was vague enough not to define when the meeting would take place.
What the head of the Executive did take advantage of was to vindicate the territorial pacification work that, he said, he had launched since he arrived at the Moncloa in June 2018. And he also responded, indirectly, to complaints about the alleged non-compliance. to amnesty the leaders of the process.
“We understand that the amnesty occurs at the moment in which it is already endorsed by the Cortes Generales,” said the president. That is to say, the Government has already fulfilled the commitment it made so that Junts agreed to support the investiture of Pedro Sánchez just over a year ago.
“Catalan society and Spanish society as a whole have turned the page on what happened in 2017,” said Sánchez, who assured that “Spanish society cannot constantly look back.” The president advocated “looking forward.” It was in that context that he said he had “no problem” in accessing said meeting.
Sánchez went even further by giving the recent agreements of the PP with Junts on taxes as an example that the amnesty is fully in force. The president recalled that those of Alberto Núñez Feijóo called multiple demonstrations and rallies throughout Spain to protest against the grace measure to end up agreeing with their deputies in Congress.
The president criticized the “enormous hypocrisy” of the PP for having accused it of “little less than forgiving the independence movement’s coup.” “And now it turns out that they are showing their chests for agreeing on votes,” he concluded.
This same Monday, Feijóo’s right-hand man in Congress, Miguel Tellado, warned that the PP is open to closing more agreements with the Catalan pro-independence right. Two weeks ago he already said he felt “very satisfied” with these agreements. “It is true that there are misgivings in the political sphere in Spain about the PP’s relations with Junts, but they reside fundamentally in the PSOE, which is tremendously worried,” said the parliamentary spokesperson in a press conference, Europa Press reports.
Even Vox, whose votes were essential for the tax counter-reform, said last week that it would be willing to join a motion of censure by the PP and Junts against Pedro Sánchez. “Yes Together. Vox and PP want to propose a motion of censure, it is their right,” he said, and added not without some sarcasm: “I don’t know very well how conservative voters should interpret it.”
For this reason, according to Sánchez, “for political purposes” the amnesty “already applies.” Because at the judicial level, no. Or not at all. “It is being applied by the PP” who “are voting together again and taking advantage of those votes with Junts per Catalunya.” “That the PP and Puigdemont reach agreements is a success of the amnesty law, it is good,” added the President of the Government, who insisted on valuing the “normalization that politics sought” by pardoning the leaders of the process. .
“Democracy is now full, because effectively all actors, in parliamentary terms, are inside, operating and doing politics,” concluded the president.
Sánchez thus responded this Monday in his year-end report to Puigdemont’s requests for the Government and the PSOE to advance in compliance with their investiture agreements. This same month of December, the leader of Junts assured that he was not afraid of the polls, while his general secretary, Jordi Turull, said in an interview in elDiario.es that they are not “impressed” by the “speech that if you do not vote for Pedro Sánchez, the PP and Vox are coming.”
The leader of Junts has met on multiple occasions with the socialist number three, Santos Cerdán. Also with the third vice president and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz. But, for now, with no one from the socialist part of the Government.
What Sánchez did not explain was how he is going to bring together all the Government’s parliamentary partners in the 2025 Budgets, especially after the strong public ideological discrepancies between Podemos, on the one hand, and Junts and the PNV, on the other, to account of fiscal policy, with the extraordinary tax on energy companies and the reforms to speed up evictions as the main discrepancies. Sánchez hoped to achieve support to obtain the public accounts for 2025 and remain in power until 2027. And perhaps beyond: “With this opposition, there will be a progressive majority at the polls in 2027.”
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