Foment considers that his efforts to establish a unifying point between the entire political right, and specifically, his recent meeting with Carles Puigdemont, are yielding the first results. The objective is to take advantage of the current fragmentation of the Congress of Deputies, in which the Government imperatively needs the votes of formations such as Junts and PNV, to stop proposals that the employers consider harmful. Proposals such as establishing union participation in the boards of directors of companies that were stopped yesterday by the Labor Commission of Congress, with these two formations voting against.
Sánchez Llibre relates this vote to his visit to former president Carles Puigdemont last week in Perpignan, a meeting in which members of the Foment management and members of the Junts candidacy and the party's general secretary, Jordi Turull, participated. This is how he presented it this morning to the CEOE executive. It was in response to questions from the president of Cepyme, Gerardo Cuerva, that Sánchez Llibre developed his strategy of establishing ties with Junts and also maintaining close contacts with the PNV to achieve favorable positions for these two formations.
The president of Foment has specified that yesterday's negative vote in the Congress of Deputies is related to these contacts. It is part of the strategy that Foment has implemented since the legislature started, which is an approach to Junts to explain the interests of the employers' association. In this morning's meeting, only one public position that disagreed with Sánchez Llibre's meeting with Puigdemont was expressed, and it was that of Miguel Garrido, president of the Madrid employers' association CEIM. “I wouldn't have done it,” he said.
The participation of the unions in the boards of directors is a demand of the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, who has managed to add the PSOE to the project, although without enthusiasm, and who is opposed by the employers. Yesterday, the initiative took the form of a non-legal proposition, Sumar, supported by the PSOE, which was debated in the Labor Commission of the Cortes. However, when the opposing votes of Junts and the PNV, regular partners of the Government, joined those of PP and Vox, the proposal was rejected.
A rejection that does not, however, mean the end of the initiative. Yesterday it was a non-legal proposal, but the Government has in its regulatory plan for this year the provision of drafting a law with this objective. What Sumar sought with this first step was to obtain prior endorsement which, given the result, it has not achieved.
