The agreement signed today between Junts and PSOE opens an "unprecedented stage" that could culminate in a "historic agreement" to resolve the Catalan political conflict, Carles Puigdemont said in an appearance without questions before the press in Brussels in which he did not hide the "historical distrust" towards their interlocutors ("we would not do anyone any favors by denying the evidence") nor the difficulties that await them along the way. Because the pact "in itself does not resolve anything," Puigdemont has warned his future parliamentary partners.
In this legislature, unlike the previous one, the PSOE must gain the stability of the Government "agreement by agreement." "The legislature is conditioned on progress and not only on compliance," Puigdemont stressed two hours after the PSOE presented the pact with Junts as a legislative agreement, not only for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. "The 'for nothing' [support] has gone to the trash can of history." "Progress must be justified month by month for each law that the PSOE brings to Congress," he added.
To supervise this process of dialogue and negotiation, the pact provides for the creation of a "verification mechanism" that Puigdemont has presented in more personal terms, as a team made up of different personalities from the international arena. "To be independent you cannot be Spanish or Catalan, you must be international" and your work "cannot be carried out in the Spanish State," stressed Puigdemont, who has announced that the names of some people who will form that team have already been agreed upon. . Their first meeting will take place at the end of November.
How far will this agreement allow us to go? Puigdemont said. "The route and the ambition will depend on us. We have not set any other limit other than the will of the people of Catalonia," he assured in an appearance without questions held at the Brussels Press Club, a privately managed organization in the European neighborhood of Brussels, the same place where just over six years ago it held its first press conference when the president and several of his councilors secretly left Catalonia for Belgium.
The leader of JxCat, who has controlled the conversations with the socialists at all times in recent weeks, since last August, has made it clear that the document they have signed is a "framework agreement to begin a political negotiation that resolves the conflict" and not the end of the journey. In his opinion, from now on there will be a "change of focus in the official narrative" that has been heard until now. That, the former president believes, will lead to the agreements reached being "irreversible."
The intervention, which lasted about twenty minutes, barely made reference to the amnesty law negotiated with the PSOE and to which the rest of the political groups that are willing to support Sánchez's investiture must now give their approval, before is presented as a legislative proposal in Congress. "There is a shared will not to leave out anyone who has suffered persecution" of an administrative, economic or any other type for their "mere contribution" to the Catalan independence movement, said Puigdemont, who hopes that some episodes of the " "dirty war" of the State, such as spying on the mobile phones of some Catalan politicians.
Puigdemont also wanted to distance himself from Esquerra Republicana. In the first paragraph of the pact signed today, it is emphasized that the "dynamics" of conflict resolution will be "in different terms than those of the last legislature." "Let it be clear that to do the same thing that has been done and say the same thing that has been said, there is no need for Junts," he highlighted in an appearance that began at two in the afternoon and in which the now MEP has been supported by personalities such as the party's general secretary, Jordi Turull, the spokesperson for Junts in Congress, Míriam Nogueras, or the former councilor Toni Comín.
"I am happy to think that those conditions [that he set at a conference in September] inspired others who today share what until a few weeks ago they considered or saw as unnecessary," Puigdemont said in reference to ERC, while recalling that Dissent with his former partners led his party to abandon the Government of the Generalitat a year ago. "Surely it means that what we have been maintaining for years and that even forced us to leave the Government of Catalonia was not due to a lack of reality principle, nor to any refusal to engage in politics, nor to any hyperventilation," he said. continued Puigdemont, who later also criticized the Republicans for the partial transfer of Rodalies that they agreed with the PSOE.
The aspects to be negotiated, Puigdemont has listed, are the possibility of there being a referendum, a comprehensive transfer of Rodalies, changes in financing and providing collection powers to the Tax Agency of Catalonia, or powers in matters of immigration. "We have not had to ask for forgiveness and we maintain our position. From there we began the negotiation and not a mere dialogue," concluded Puigdemont, in another dig directed at the Republicans, since before the pardons there was a renunciation of unilaterality. by Oriol Junqueras.
