Although, since yesterday Monday, contacts between PSOE and Junts have only ceased during the night, and documents have continued to be exchanged between both delegations, sources familiar with the negotiations in Brussels lower the expectations of reaching an agreement in time on the amnesty to celebrate the investiture session of Pedro Sánchez this week, as was thought until yesterday.
All of this in the midst of a very tense political environment throughout Spain with right-wing mobilizations, led by Vox, against the socialist headquarters and the judiciary actively working against the amnesty. Yesterday the conservative majority of the General Council of the Judiciary imposed a declaration contrary to an amnesty law, while the judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón charged twelve people with terrorism for the Tsunami Democràtic protests, among them Carles Puigdemont and Marta Rovira.
PSOE and Junts agree that they need more time to negotiate the final technical details of the next amnesty law. The relevance of this legislation, sources familiar with the negotiation insist, forces us to act rigorously and do a good job. In this sense, the Government's spokesperson minister, Isabel Rodríguez, was less forceful this Tuesday than other times about the future of the legislature when responding during the press conference after the Council of Ministers: "If the investiture goes ahead and Therefore, there is a new Government, as we wish."
At Junts, in turn, they maintain uncertainty and avoid setting deadlines for the agreement after it was considered imminent in the previous days. "The best thing for the negotiation is that there is no noise and that there is discretion," insist other sources familiar with the negotiation who transfer the pressure to the socialists. "The pressure is on them," point out those sources who also claim the work that is being done regarding the ERC pact with the socialists. "There is still time, we are doing what ERC has not done," they point out.
The legal deadline to elect the new president of the Government is November 27, they emphasize. For the moment, not osbtante, number 3 of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, remains in Brussels, installed in a hotel in the European district. And for Junts, in addition to Puigdemont, the general secretary, Jordi Turull, the president, Laura Borràs, and the leader of Junts in Madrid, Míriam Nogueras, are in the community capital.
“Technical issues” in the legal field, in the drafting of the amnesty law, that would affect the cases that the post-convergents consider lawfare – use of the courts for political purposes and persecution for political reasons – continue to mark the distances between both formations in the negotiation for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez.
At JxCat they want to ensure that cases that they associate with the process but are not directly related to the 9-N consultation and the 1-O referendum are also amnestied. Such would be the case of the former minister Miquel Buch, convicted a few weeks ago by Puigdemont's bodyguard, or the head of the former president's office, the historian Josep Lluís Alay, pending trial for attending a referendum that took place in New Caledonia in the fall. 2020 and pay for the trip with public resources. Or some of the pieces of the Voloh, a case that is being investigated in court number 1 of Barcelona with various people investigated and crimes of different kinds.
In that section there are those who have also tried to include the president of Junts, Laura Borràs, convicted in the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia for irregularities during her time as director of the Institution of Catalan Letters, or Puigdemont's lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, who is pending trial in the National Court.
The criminal is accused of money laundering and document falsification along with the drug trafficker Sito Miñanco, whom he had defended until 2019. However, the socialists understand that these two causes, although at certain times their protagonists have pointed out that they are an example of lawfare and both made allusions to that issue yesterday on their social networks, they have nothing to do with the process and in JxCat they have not defended themselves like the other cases mentioned above.
