Cordiality, normality and a lot to negotiate are the emblems of the almost three-hour meeting held yesterday by the acting vice-president and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, and the former president of the Generalitat and MEP of Junts, Carles Puigdemont, as part of the Sumar's initiatives to pave the way for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez at the head of a progressive coalition government. At the end of the meeting, both issued a brief joint statement in which they described the meeting as "fruitful" and hoped that it would allow "establishing a normalized and stable relationship between the two political groups" for the future legislature.
The meeting, prepared with discretion and care between the two formations for weeks, was communicated to Moncloa just a few hours before it took place and publicly announced by a press release from Sumar, early yesterday, summoning the media in Brussels to take of images of the meeting. Despite the duration of the meeting, these images were a fundamental part of what was agreed, because although during the last five years several members of the executive have maintained indirect and direct contacts with Puigdemont -among them, former vice president Pablo Iglesias-, they had always refused to make them official with an image of institutional normality like the one that the leader of Sumar starred in yesterday and that Puigdemont craved.
“We share the deep conviction that politics must be done based on dialogue and democratic principles. In this sense, we agree to explore all democratic solutions to unblock the political conflict", reported both parties at the end of the meeting: "Political problems must return to political channels, to find solutions based on dialogue". "Democracy consists of dialogue between different positions", they conclude, in an implicit defense that occurs 24 hours after Puigdemont announces, also in Brussels, what his conditions will be to support the investiture as President of the Government of the socialist leader, Pedro Sanchez.
The meeting began at twelve noon and ended ten minutes after three in the afternoon. Puigdemont and Díaz had arrived at the same time, accompanied by the former minister and MEP Toni Comín and the leader of Sumar in Catalonia, Jaume Asens, who has acted as mediator with Junts since Díaz entrusted him with this task the day after the 23-23 elections. J.
The four arrived at the same time and chatted cordially for a few minutes on camera before beginning their meeting behind closed doors. "Everyone is talking to everyone," Sumar sources commented shortly before the meeting, which did not have an exact scheduled duration: "We do not set deadlines, it is a very important meeting for both parties." At the exit, the former president did not react to the questions from the reporters who were waiting at the door, but Díaz did state that the meeting went “very well”. "Of course" there will be more meetings between the two, added the vice president.
The former president did comment on the meeting on his account on the social network X –formerly Twitter– to frame it within “normality”: “Dialogue and maintaining political relations between formations of different ideologies should not be any surprise, nor should it be exceptional.” The meeting, the first of a public nature between a member of the Spanish government and the leader of JxCat – there have been many discreet conversations over the last five years – since he established his residence in Belgium in 2017 after the declaration of independence, took place in the work room of the Eurocámara.
Regarding this meeting, Moncloa sources distanced themselves from the Government and assured that the vice president has gone to Brussels on behalf of Sumar and that in no case does she represent the PSOE or the coalition executive itself. According to these sources, Moncloa was not informed until late yesterday night, as "faits accomplis." "There is nothing agreed," they point out from Moncloa. "Nothing to do with us," they conclude.
Sources from Sumar, for their part, point out that "this is one more step in our determined commitment to open a new era of solutions based on dialogue and democracy" and recall that "we said it since we were born, throughout the campaign and We reaffirm it now: we are the ones who are thinking of solutions for the next decade, that is why this has to be a legislature of social and plurinational progress, and we are getting to work”. The same sources point out that as democrats, "we respect the citizenry and carry out the conversations with total transparency, as well as the interlocutors of each formation." In Sumar, in any case, they celebrated the speech of President Pedro Sánchez, yesterday at the Ateneo breakfasts, to the extent that, although he did not allude to the meeting, he did offer the context to which he responds: that of a legislature that must be that of the dialogue that puts an end to the Catalan political conflict. Sumar insists that, despite the messages from Moncloa and the angry protest of the PP, "everyone is talking to everyone, although some are hiding." The allusion was addressed, more than to his government partner, to the PP, whose leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, explained last week that Junts is a "valid interlocutor" to try to achieve his inauguration as president and whose contacts with Junts are intense.
The truth is that the negotiations between Sumar and Junts began much earlier and were substantial in concretizing the support of the Catalan groups for the formation of the Congress table, on August 17, when the executive promoted the use of the co-official languages both in the Congress of Deputies as well as in the European institutions. It is no coincidence that the initiative to reform the regulations of Congress to enable the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician came from the Sumar multinational group and was publicly announced two weeks earlier, on August 2, when the dialogue was already underway. between those of Yolanda Díaz and Carles Puigdemont.
