“We are not going to allow any deviation from the constitutional order, whether active or passive,” warned the first vice president of the Government and deputy general secretary of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero, in the face of Esquerra's renewed demands to promote a self-determination referendum in Catalonia. or the manifest intention of Junts, already in a scenario of full electoral contest, to complete the independence process of 2017.
Montero stressed, in an interview on RNE, that both Junts and ERC "have to be clear that the PSOE is not going to allow any limit to be crossed." “And the Government of Spain is going to ensure, as it is doing, strict compliance with the constitutional order,” he said. This is demonstrated, he stated, by the appeal to the Constitutional Court (TC) approved on Tuesday by the Council of Ministers against the decision of the Parliamentary Board to admit for processing a popular legislative initiative to declare the independence of Catalonia.
The vice president has assured that "we are not going to do what the Rajoy Government did, of looking the other way in these situations and letting things arise and pass, as if they had the capacity to turn off on their own." This attitude of the former president of the Popular Party Government, the socialist leader recalled, led to a unilateral declaration of independence and the holding of a couple of illegal referendums in Catalonia. Montero has instead defended the “ability to intervene at key moments” of Pedro Sánchez's Executive. “We are not going to allow there to be any departure from the constitutional order, and the pro-independence parties know it,” she stressed.
The Catalan electoral pre-campaign of 12-M has opened a parenthesis in the relations, negotiations and agreements of the Government and the PSOE with the Government of the Generalitat, with Esquerra Republicana and with Junts per Catalunya, in which each of the actors It entrenches itself in its positions and reaffirms its objectives ahead of the election, amidst mutual accusations of overacting.
It was the reproach that the spokesperson of the Generalitat, the Republican Patrícia Plaja, also launched after the Council of Ministers this Tuesday approved to challenge and request the suspension of the decision of the Parliamentary Board that gave the green light to the processing of the initiative to declare the independence of Catalonia. “The Government has learned little or nothing from recent years,” lamented Plaja.
“There are others who have to learn that there are paths that lead nowhere,” Montero replied to the spokesperson for the Generalitat. A “quite general” conclusion from everything experienced in the last decade in Catalonia, the vice president pointed out, is that “you cannot generate an expectation that has no instruments or means to achieve it, nor can you embark many people in a process that ends nowhere.” “It was a road to nowhere,” she insisted. A path that, in her opinion, only leads “to confrontation between Catalans.”
Everyone should have already learned the lessons learned from the process, the vice president has pointed out in any case. “But when that does not happen, we must show where the limits are,” Montero warned, in reference to the Government's new challenge before the Constitutional Court.
Six weeks before the polls in Catalonia, the vice president pointed out that “during electoral campaigns there are many parties that overreact, especially those that have a more complicated story regarding their roadmap for the future.” in reference to the independence formations. “They cling to issues and situations that I hope the voters in Catalonia will definitively leave behind,” she confided. “Those times are behind us and now we have to look to the future, with everyone, even with parties that do not share the constitutional order, incorporated into the institutions and political dynamics,” she defended.
Montero has defended the “firm will” of Pedro Sánchez to “move forward towards harmony, reconciliation, coexistence and normalization in Catalonia”, through measures such as pardons or amnesty, “which allows this page to be closed in Catalonia and open a process of hope” to face the “real problems” that Catalans have.
In this sense, the vice president has assured that the PSC "has the best predictions" to win the elections, in addition to "an undisputed leader", such as Salvador Illa, and "a project of reunion, concord and fraternity." “Hopefully we will not only be the most voted list, which everything points to, but with a sufficient majority to allow us to govern, to once again revitalize public services and fully incorporate Catalonia with all its economic potential,” she confided.
