The waters that in recent days separated Junts per Catalunya and PSOE in the negotiation for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, regarding the amnesty law, have returned to normal this weekend. Proof of this is that the JxCat leaders returned to Brussels this Sunday to try to settle the agreement together with former president Carles Puigdemont, who has been the orchestra director and at many times also the interpreter in the conversations with the socialists.
The secretary general of the post-convergent formation, Jordi Turull, and the president of his group in the Parliament, Albert Batet, flew today to the Belgian capital given the possibility that the entente could materialize in a matter of hours. The president of the party, Laura Borràs, who attended the funeral of the deceased doctor Carles Furriols, plans to do so this Monday, according to sources consulted. Another of the party's prominent leaders, the president of the Parliament, Anna Erra, has had an agenda free of events since yesterday.
The negotiations between both parties had advanced considerably in a discreet manner at the end of October and a week ago it was considered that the pact was on track, although not closed, and that it would be difficult to turn back, so the negotiation was staged with a photo of Puigdemont with Santos Cerdán, number three of the socialists – secretary of organization in Ferraz – and person of Sánchez's greatest confidence. The meeting, attended by other leaders, took place in the European Parliament and was the first public image of the contacts between both parties.
However, when it seemed that the pact had already been made last Thursday and the leadership of the post-convergents had been summoned to a hotel in Brussels – an appearance had even been prepared to announce it –, the drafting of the amnesty law reopened a gap between JxCat and the PSOE – the discrepancies started on Wednesday night – that in the last few hours has been redirected. Santos Cerdán was in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to try to secure the support of the post-convergents, but upon realizing that the entente was not imminent, he decided to return to Madrid at the last minute on Friday.
The truth is that on Friday the negotiators of Junts – Puigdemont, Turull and the party leader in Madrid, Mírian Nogueras – met in the European Parliament in Brussels with those of the PSOE, but apparently there was no face-to-face meeting and there was, instead, an exchange of documents and negotiation by telematic means - with jurists involved -, at the same time that the general secretary of JxCat asked for "calm" from his people in the face of the hours and days of "pressure" on his party that he predicted.
The discrepancies had to do with causes related to the process but not directly related to the 9-N consultation of 2014 or the referendum of October 1, 2017, what Junts understands as lawfare, the use of judicial procedures for the purposes of political persecution. , discrediting or destruction of the public image and disqualification of a political adversary.
This would be the case, in the opinion of Junts, of the recent conviction of the former Minister of the Interior Miquel Buch, by the Mossos d'Esquadra agent who had accompanied Puigdemont as an escort; of the Voloh case, a mixed bag with various pieces that is being investigated in court number 1 of Barcelona; or the pending trial of the head of the former president's office, the historian Josep Lluís Alay, for attending the referendum that took place in New Caledonia in 2020, a case that has a trial date.
In fact, Puigdemont, who has avoided the media focus during these months of negotiations beyond his conference on September 5 and the few times he has spoken he has done so through messages on the social network X, formerly Twitter, has made this Sunday a reference to lawfare cases. “The strategic use of laws to harm dissidents or political rivals does not seek to do justice but rather to achieve, by means unacceptable in democracy, political effects through the judicial power,” said the leader of JxCat, who made a veiled reference to what separated Junts from the PSOE.
