The programmatic agreement of the PSOE and Sumar made public today to reissue the legislative coalition does not put any pressure on the independence movement. This is how the Government considers it. In fact, quite the opposite: the Executive of Pere Aragonès believes that the social measures announced. If they want to move forward, they put the ball in Pedro Sánchez's court. The arithmetic is capricious: the independence vote is necessary today for the acting president if he wants to retake his position.
The Government spokesperson, Patrícia Plaja, has seen staging in the words of the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, from a few days ago, with which she assured that the PSOE-Sumar agreement was far away. "It is an announcement that was taken for granted," said Plaja, "but it will be of little use if they are not able to close the pacts with the pro-independence parties", ERC and Junts. And in his opinion the pact that is far away is that of the socialists with these two forces. "The Government defends the need to take advantage of the arithmetic that the votes have given us to advance in amnesty, in the conditions to exercise the right to self-determination and improve the conditions of Catalans," the spokesperson stressed. The latter is well known: the Government and ERC insist on the comprehensive transfer of Rodalies and ending the fiscal deficit of 22,000 million euros. "May the PSOE be brave."
Furthermore, for the Government, the measures announced by Sánchez and Díaz are in the image and similarity of those that Aragonès has undertaken during this legislature in Catalonia: "They continue the path opened in progress policies by this Government." At this point, he has stated free schooling from 0 to 3 years, the regularization of rents or advances in the quality of work.
"If this is so, we will celebrate it, but we will be very attentive and we will look closely and in detail at the small print so that there is no attempt to invade competencies and that each measure that entails more expenses for the Genewralitat is compensated as appropriate, accompanied with the necessary financing," the spokesperson warned.
Patrícia Plaja was accompanied by the Minister of Social Rights, Carles Campuzano, in this afternoon's press conference after the Executive Council meeting. He has been in charge of dispelling all doubts from the ERC Government about the possibility that the PSOE and Junts study incorporating the concept of "national minority" in the preamble of a hypothetical amnesty law. "The Government is very clear that we are not a national minority. (...) Catalonia is a nation". For Campuzano, in fact, it is the term nation that guarantees that Catalonia aspires to independence.
The minister has been so forceful and has clarified yesterday's elusive positioning of ERC. He has given arguments to reject this concept - "it is a very wrong approach" - and has recalled that national minorities usually refer to groups of citizens of the language or culture of one country who reside in another country. "The presence of Hungarian-speaking citizens in Romania; of Russian-speaking citizens in Latvia...", Campuzano exemplified.
