This week the so-called dialogue table between the Government and the Government of the Generalitat must meet in Madrid. What will they talk about? Apparently from what they call dejudicialization, something very difficult that, ultimately, does not depend on the Executive chaired by Pedro Sánchez. What is in the hands of the judges makes its way, sometimes incomprehensible. An example of this is what has happened with the five electoral trustees of the referendum on 1-O, elected at the time by the Parliament: they were acquitted by the criminal court number 11 of Barcelona of the crimes of disobedience and usurpation of public functions, but the Barcelona Court now forces a repeat of that trial, as requested by the prosecution. That doesn't help deflate.
The content of the dialogue table is something that no one is capable of saying: in principle, it was about talking in depth about the causes of the Catalan political crisis that started in 2012, although the two concepts that the independence movement considers to be priorities are parked, amnesty and self-determination. Each party concerned has a lexicon and a story to legitimize this type of negotiation before their respective parish. For the central Cabinet, the fetish syntagm is “reunion agenda” and so it is repeated. The distance between the words of some and those of others is discounted, it is part of the ritual that allows looking for intersections to advance discreetly in some substantial elements. But we are trapped in a lack of definition that subtracts credibility from the only way that reminds us of the primacy of politics over repressive logic.
If the continent (the table between governments) postpones treating the causes of the Catalan crisis as content (dialogue), the conflict becomes a taboo and, then, the meetings at the highest level are pure mime so that they do not say that it is not fulfilled a certain calendar. Is there laziness in Moncloa before the Catalan agenda? The pardons – a very important gesture by Sánchez – could have opened the door to a serious review of what has happened in Catalonia since the approval of the Autonomous Statute in 2006. We are not in that scenario.
The risk seems obvious to me: the exploration of desirable palliative measures on the judicial effects of the procés can hide, blur and freeze the essential dialogue on those causes that turned the disaffection of many Catalans (recorded by President Montilla) into a bet to disconnect from the Spanish State, and in a subsequent large-scale mobilization, with few precedents in Europe in the last half century. Without this deep dialogue, Madrid will never have a road map for Catalonia that goes beyond the crude offer of carrots and sticks. For this reason, although the possible reform of the crime of sedition deserves many conversations, we must not lose sight of the fundamental task assumed by those who convened the table.
