Every day he is busy negotiating the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, which is not free of tug-of-war, ups and downs and complications. The role that the acting President of the Government confers on Salvador Illa in everything related to the Catalan portfolio – photo and staging included this Wednesday in Ferraz, at the PSOE headquarters – is one more. He did not sit well with Junts per Catalunya, which is still fresh from the Barcelona City Council episode.
To this we must add the positions against the amnesty expressed by various political and socioeconomic actors, as well as those of the socialist old guard; or the Parliament's resolution on the referendum, which barely caused perplexity in Barcelona, although it caused a stir in Madrid.
Thus, as of today, the only thing clear is that the negotiations are continuing and that the JxCat parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies will vote yes or no. The post-convergent negotiating team, headed by former president Carles Puigdemont, commented to the PSOE that they rule out abstention.
In this way, the possibility that the only deputy that the Canary Coalition has in the Lower House, Cristina Valido, votes in favor of the investiture to downplay the importance of Junts and that a yes from the post-convergents is not necessary is a dead letter. In this sense, the Canary Islands president, Fernando Clavijo, had spoken out, considering this option so that Puigdemont's men could become a "secondary actor."
From the beginning, contacts between socialists and post-convergents have been marked by mutual distrust, although the agreement for the Congress Board has smoothed over differences and laid the foundations for a possible entente. However, the figure of Illa, as Puigdemont and the general secretary of JxCat, Jordi Turull, highlighted yesterday, does not help create the climate of trust that the negotiation requires.
“It seems to me that giving prominence to the person who deceived Junts the day before the pact of shame in Barcelona to prevent Xavier Trias from being mayor is a very strange way of showing us that they are trustworthy,” Turull remarked. In turn, Puigdemont also expressed his distrust in the same sense. “Jordi Turull does well to remember the reasons why Salvador Illa can never be a valid interlocutor to generate trust,” concluded the now MEP.
The first secretary of the Catalan socialists, for his part, avoided the hand-to-hand combat and friction with the post-convergents. Illa addressed these messages in an interview on Catalunya Ràdio and assured that he “will not get involved in that.” “I'm not looking for any role,” he concluded. “That the PSC obtained the results it obtained and has the weight it has in Catalan politics is obvious to everyone,” added the former Minister of Health.
Turull was referring to the mayor of Barcelona, for which Jaume Collboni combined the support of Ada Colau's commons and the votes of Daniel Sirera's PP at the last minute. In Junts they were counting on leading the mayor's office of the Catalan capital after winning the elections on May 28. The truth is that beyond the discomfort over the maneuver itself, the post-convergent formation felt bad about the fact that in the previous hours this movement was hidden along with Barcelona en Comú and the popular ones by the PSC, since several times they had exchanged messages.
On the other side of the balance, however, is the fluid relationship of Junts with the PSC in the Parliament, in the work of opposition to the Government of Pere Aragonès. At the sector level, both groups have expressed harmony since the beginning of the legislature on various issues such as infrastructure or large projects such as the Hard Rock complex, the fourth beltway or the expansion of the El Prat airport.
