Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont agree but do not understand each other. They need international advisors, so no one should be surprised that, after facilitating the investiture, the former president has drawn up scenarios of breaking with the PSOE and exposes them without hesitation to Manfred Weber himself. From disruptive to disruptive. From revolutionary to Green Deal Killer, according to Politico's definition. The PP criticizes the socialists for meeting with Puigdemont while their European striker against the amnesty allows himself to be surprised by the former president at the Fiftieth Anniversary Museum in Brussels with unusual motions of censure and votes of punishment.
Puigdemont has been in the European capital for six years and almost four as an MEP, but he had only exchanged distant greetings with Weber. The former president was the “fugitive” for the PP (and the PSOE). Now, he is a kingmaker and, as Weber longs for the day when Alberto Núñez Feijóo is president, Puigdemont launches the bait of a union between Junts and the PP, justified if Sánchez does not comply with the pacts. The excess of gesticulation leads Puigdemont, according to Politico, to compare the reference to lawfare with “the horse's head in The Godfather, it is a warning that we are serious.”
This casual conversation is the preamble to the meeting between negotiators from Junts and the PSOE with the presence of international advisors. In The 50 Laws of Power in The Godfather, the Chilean sociologist Alberto Mayol maintains that we must “distrust the mediators, they usually have a side”, but for Puigdemont and Sánchez they are the way to keep alive a political agreement that starts with an agreement about the discrepancies. Another thing is the viability of three parallel negotiating tables and if the international advisors, mediators and verifiers involved in the process do not end up unanimously recommending the unification of the debates and the definition of the objective: save the legislature or solve the political conflict? ?
The Henry Dunant Center for Humanitarian Dialogue is one of the advisors in the PSOE negotiations with Junts and with ERC. This entity not only mediated in the negotiation for the end of ETA, but has been in contact with the pro-independence parties since Sánchez and Quim Torra signed the Pedralbes declaration in 2018. In fact, even the summary of the Tsunami case that instructs its will, Judge Manuel García-Castellón in the National Court reveals the existence of a Signal group with the presence of Marta Rovira and Josep Alay in which contacts with the entity were addressed under the acronym HD and euphemistic references to Harley-Davidson, according to publishes El Mundo. Junts abandoned the dialogue game to fuel the “intelligent confrontation” and has now resumed contact with the center to involve it in the new stage of the party after 23-J.
The confidentiality contract under which these types of organizations work does not allow confirmation of their intervention but in the extension of the negotiation with ERC there are more organizations in the portfolio. In fact, Marta Rovira mentioned a few days ago the Berghof foundation, the Swisspeace institute and the Geneva Center for Security Policy. It is likely that one of them will also sit at the table between Republicans and socialists. Added to the proliferation of external consultancies is the disparity of interlocutors, including the PSOE, since Santos Cerdán is the man for Junts, while ERC interacts with Minister Félix Bolaños, although it remains to be seen if he participates in the first meeting of the table with ERC scheduled in Geneva with Marta Rovira. The meeting will be placed on the calendar around Sánchez's appointment with Pere Aragonès on the 21st at the Palau de la Generalitat.
For now, the Republicans have given the media focus to Junts with the idea of highlighting their strategic turn. Despite the international advisors, everyone has two electoral events in mind, the European ones in June 2024, with Puigdemont as the candidate, and the Catalan ones scheduled for February 2025. The fruit of the Junts and ERC negotiation tables will be battleground of the independence parties. “We're serious,” they say.
