President Pedro Sánchez does not have guaranteed support from Esquerra for his inauguration at this time of Thursday, September 28. “Absolutely not,” said the president of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, before the lions' door of the Congress of Deputies, after meeting with the groups of the Upper and Lower Chambers of Esquerra Republicana.
Esquerra's vote, he then added, "will depend on the attitude of the PSOE and the candidate when it comes to siding with the citizens, on issues such as the financing of public services, health, transport, railways and also in the reestablishment of justice, which has been perverted.”
With this perversion of justice, the ERC leader was referring to the amnesty. “No one should be convicted or persecuted for something that is not a crime, because the call for a referendum is not in the Penal Code, which is why we are in favor of amnesty,” he indicated. But he did not introduce more pressure into the negotiation and avoided drawing red lines or establishing maximum deadlines: “The sooner this injustice is reversed, the better.”
He was also careful in the nuances when talking about his aspiration to hold a self-determination referendum, and from his words it can be deduced that ERC's aspiration does not include unilateral actions: “We are in favor of being able to exercise the right to vote with the maximum recognition by all parties,” he said, adding that in Esquerra “we will not give up negotiating a referendum in Catalonia.”
Regarding the PSC's refusal to support the Government's proposed resolution, Junqueras simply stressed that the Catalan socialists "will know what they are doing and whether or not it is convenient for them to vote against that proposal."
