Pedro Sánchez moderates his media exposure. Amnesty? His answer is generosity, harmony, forgiveness... "We are negotiating". The amnesty negotiation is like meigas, haberlas, haylas, and aside from Sumar. Another thing is how it is called, who it affects and how it is justified. What is difficult to fit in now is the added gesture that independence has imposed itself on self-determination, which ERC and not Junts is flagging, and which fuels the mobilization of the right this weekend in Barcelona.
Carles Puigdemont has not renounced unilateralism, although, in collusion with the PSOE, he places the focus on other files without fear that, as custodian of the 1-O, he will be accused of being a traitor. But ERC needs to give continuity to the investiture pact of 2019. A moral recognition of the fact that they have cleared the road that Junts is now traveling, hogging the spotlight and that has placed the return of Puigdemont as a post-convergent victory on the horizon.
Oriol Junqueras asks for "more" and sows uneasiness in Junts' leadership because of the tension added to the negotiation that places them as a first-class political actor. The next milestone is October 24 for the officialization of Catalan in the EU and to tie up a verification system for agreements that only include intentions in advance. The ERC warns that despising them by taking their votes for granted is an added risk for the PSOE. In other words, Pere Aragones insists in public: "amnesty and self-determination". And other folders are opened privately to compensate.
During the government of José Montilla, far from self-determinism, an ERC councilor justified himself: "This government is self-determining with each of its decisions". The defense of the right to self-determination is more than normalized in the Parliament archive. Before the process, eleven motions or resolutions had been approved that claimed it, and in 2012 the PSC broke the voting discipline of the PSOE in Congress and defended the dialogue "to make it possible to hold a consultation with the citizens of Catalonia for decide on their future".
Emphasizing the need for dialogue and voting, without specifying the scope of the voting or what happens if there is no agreement, is the recurring formula in the negotiations between the Generalitat and the Spanish Government. Pedralbes' declaration of December 2018 - with Quim Torra - was committed to an "effective dialogue" in which each party could put forward proposals that had "to gain broad support from Catalan society". The 2019 investiture pact between ERC and the PSOE established that the agreements of the dialogue table would be subjected to "democratic validation through consultation with the citizens of Catalonia", "in accordance with the mechanisms foreseen or that are established within the framework of the legal and political system".
The unusual pro-independence union to condition the investiture on the fact that Sánchez works "to make the conditions for the holding of a referendum effective" revolted the PSOE, which highlighted in private how Junts eluded grandiloquence. Puigdemont already avoided the referendum as a requirement and, in the commemoration of 1-O, he had agreed with pro-independence organizations that there would be no references to the negotiation. The president of the ANC not only broke the script, but asked to declare independence after securing the amnesty. The new banner of unilateralism two years ago was limited to proposing that Parliament propose a reform of the Constitution simply to provoke a debate on the Catalan issue.
The "referendum or referendum" was left behind. "Amnesty and something else" asks to continue the path of the dialogue table and open the third folder that ERC defends: the transfer of Rodalies, the improvement of financing or oxygenating the budgets of the Generalitat. Discarded after 1- O the viability of unilateralism even among pro-independence voters – only 24% of Junts and 14% of ERC defend it–, the playing field is marked by words and sensitivities This is what Sánchez works on. The results will not be immediate. The negotiation will last until November.
