Tell me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are... The cruelty of the proverb has taken its toll on the PP since La Vanguardia revealed where and with whom it met to explore the possibilities of a rapprochement with Junts in this legislature.
It was already known that there had been contacts with Carles Puigdemont's party and the president of the PP himself, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, confirmed them last October, in one of his hectic visits to Catalonia, but suddenly it became known that his trusted man In Barcelona, Daniel Sirera, who had met with Josep Rius and Albert Batet in August, in a hotel room, fell like a bomb on Génova Street in Madrid.
On the PP agenda for that day, Wednesday, January 3, the presentation of the amendment to the entire amnesty law was noted in red, which was overshadowed by the commotion caused by the news of the meeting between Sirera and the advisor. Xavier Domínguez, the consultant who designed part of the PP campaign for the general elections, with two Junts representatives as close to Puigdemont as Batet and Rius.
The PP spokesperson in Congress, Miguel Tellado, dedicated the press conference to trying to put out the fire by reducing the meeting to a simple coffee and was forced to amend himself after having denied hours before having knowledge of the facts: “ Politicians sometimes have coffee with members of other parties... We have to see it with the normality that that entails,” he admitted.
But even though that coffee, which was not even such a coffee, according to Sirera, that a mineral water was ordered, wanted to be dissolved among the multiple meetings of public officials, the shock wave of the scandal spread until it shook the weak structure of the PP. of Catalonia, always under the threat of collapse due to its internal problems.
“You cannot say that you want to outlaw anti-constitutional parties – as the PP proposes in its alternative text to the amnesty law – on the same day that it is known that you meet with one of them,” explains a source from the leadership in Catalonia.
The councilor in Barcelona came forward assuring that he did not negotiate anything and that in any case the PP rejected Junts' conditions, which the PSOE later accepted so that Pedro Sánchez would retain the presidency, but among his fellow members the opposition has once again been evident. division between the two souls of the party in Catalonia.
The Catalan PP faces its postponed regional congress in 2024 without any of the candidates to replace Alejandro Fernández having dared to run openly, despite the fact that in Feijóo's environment it has very few supporters and it is considered that a renewal.
On the other hand, Fernández's supporters consider that what happened reinforces the thesis of the current president, who confronted the national leadership in the summer to demand more autonomy and question the "slippages" in the alliance strategy. The militancy most reluctant to agree with the nationalists supports it: “The parameters of Junts, which speaks of a fascist State, of lawfare, etc., are incompatible with political dialogue,” they defend those around Fernández.
Ultimately, what it is about is clarifying when the PP will be able to open up to negotiating with Junts without fracturing, both in Catalonia and in Spain, where it holds the key to governability. For the current leadership of the Catalan PP, the time has not come by far. But from the Feijóo executive, approach maneuvers began, directed by Esteban González Pons and Elías Bendodo.
Although in the medium term they may give results, the fear of some leaders is that these movements will be instrumentalized by Junts and filtered according to the interests of Puigdemont and their own: “Everyone who approaches him ends up scalded, Pedro Sánchez will be the next ”they say.
With Feijóo playing the hesitant role of Hamlet, at this ideological crossroads those in favor of exploring the path of Junts and those against entering into a “swampy territory” after the disappearance of Convergència divide. And that has a state translation. On one side are the followers of belligerent barons such as Isabel Díaz Ayuso from Madrid and on the other the conciliators, who have in the Andalusian Juanma Moreno, who on Thursday “firmly” condemned the beating of the piñata of Sánchez, their champion.
