Sánchez’s chest blows break the story about Catalonia

Pedro Sanchez is aware that the legislature will not be viable if it cannot count on Junts for its investiture majority, especially after Congress’s rejection of the path of budget stability last week.

For this reason, he has desperately tried to reverse the “definitive break” with the PSOE sealed by Carles Puigdemont a little over a month ago, and thus be able to approve the Budgets and exhaust his mandate.

The way to try to regain the trust of your determining partner has been fulfill the penance that Junts wanted to impose on him.

And the penance itself has consisted of the act of public contrition that Sánchez has undertaken this Monday, being interviewed in an unusual way on the same morning and successively by two Catalan media (RAC1 and La 2Cat), to maintain a conversation in Catalan key.

Just a month ago, the President of the Government publicly assured that he had not breached any of the commitments made with Junts. This Tuesday, Sánchez changed denial for a contrite tone. And he has verbalized half a dozen times his pain for having failed to comply with the agreement with Puigdemont.

In this way, Sánchez has recognized his sins: the “non-compliance and delays” of the Brussels agreement.

And he has done so by following to the letter the script drawn up by the secessionists. That, in addition to this public recognition and in a personal capacity, it was decided to approve specific measures demanded by Junts, just as the Council of Ministers has done with the royal decree-law which includes “some of the agreements” assumed with its partners, that Sánchez had advanced in his interview as a way to rebuild the relationship with them.

But from a political point of view, Puigdemont’s most important demand has been to unearth the thesis of the “political conflict”which Sánchez has also fulfilled religiously.

The president has maintained that in order to “be able to resolve this long-standing political conflict” the 2023 investiture agreement must be reactivated.

That is to say, the solution to this “conflict” involves recovering the “dialogue and negotiation” with Puigdemont in Switzerland.

Sánchez’s promise to fulfill all the commitments he reached with Junts would mean removing everything signed in the Brussels agreement.

That is, in addition to the four usual issues of disagreement (transfer of immigration powers, officialization of Catalan in the EU, transfer of taxes to Catalonia and materialization of the amnesty), also moving towards the self-determination referendum.

It is true that, in drafting the investiture agreement, the PSOE reserved that its way of expressing the “national recognition of Catalonia” would not be the referendum, but the “full deployment of self-government.”

but this It would be equivalent to resuming in some way the articles of the Statute annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2010, with the consequences that this would entail.

It is likely that, as has happened until now, Sánchez’s winks to Junts will be more rhetorical than effective.

But the fundamental thing is that the resurrection of the theses of “political conflict” They break Sánchez’s story about the pacification of Catalonia.

Because it was assumed that the amnesty had already consummated the “normalization” that today Sánchez has reformulated as subject to the resolution of the “political conflict” through an internationally mediated dialogue.

The price of achieving Puigdemont’s acquittal (something that, according to Junts, the president has not achieved) has been incurring a flagrant contradiction, between the narrative maintained by Moncloa about the normalization of Catalonia as a great achievement of the investiture, and the tacit affirmation that the political conflict is still open, and that its resolution will not be complete until Puigdemont returns to Spain.

This contradiction also means denying that Salvador Illa’s Government has managed to restore normality in Catalonia. Sánchez beat his chest, but it was Illa who felt the pain.