The meeting between the president Pere Aragonès and the leadership of Junts per Catalunya to try to reach joint agreements in the face of the general elections ended yesterday with higher expectations of progress than expected. After a meeting of one hour, the president of JxCat, Laura Borràs, explained that the two delegations are urged to work on the various proposals to try to find a common joint. Proposals that range from the unitary list, for which the post-convergents advocate, to the "common front" that the republicans want.
In the morning, both Aragonès in the control session and Oriol Junqueras in a press conference had ruled out the possibility of appearing in the generals in a joint list. It does not mean that this specific scenario changed in the meeting the president had with Borràs, Jordi Turull and Albert Batet in the afternoon, but that what changed was the tone and the forms. "We wanted to emphasize the need to try to tackle this opportunity in a Catalan way, in a pro-independence way and, therefore, also regain confidence in the face of the Catalan legislature", indicated Borràs.
From the Government - the meeting was also attended by councilor Laura Vilagrà - a "positive" assessment was made of the meetings - as a whole - that the president held throughout the day. It was seen with ERC, commons, CUP and Junts, and today it will be seen with PDECat, formations that are considered to be able to build "a democratic front" to "strengthen the country in the face of the threat of the right and the extreme right" .
In this way, the negotiations will continue and give rise to days of tactical movements as a result of the unexpected electoral advance announced by Pedro Sánchez. However, at yesterday's control session in Parliament, Aragonès' idea did not seem to have support. The president tried to explain his idea, out of line with his party's veto of a unitary electoral list, in the manner of Junts pel Sí, and was only met with reluctance. Together, he went over the many recent disagreements in plenary, from the breakdown of the Government - including the impeachment of Vice President Puigneró - through the negotiation with the Central Government to reform the Penal Code, to the failed independence strategic coordination in Congress.
The CUP did not fall short when it belittled a "last-minute" proposal by the president, in its opinion thought "more like a ballot and the result of bad electoral results". After the meeting with the president, the deputy Eulàlia Reguant criticized that "you can't pretend that in a month and a half what hasn't been done in two years will be solved".
And the commons were the first to meet with but Jéssica Albiach already made it clear to him in public that, with her, he could not be counted on: "Together, not in the corner", she concluded.
It was Oriol Junqueras who was responsible for clarifying the president's proposal. To begin with, let's not talk about a single list: "We do not share proposals from the past that have shown limits", concluded the president of ERC. Instead, he opened the ban to make "minimum programmatic agreements" in the run-up to the July elections in areas such as "the defense of the Catalan language and school, the end of repression or the defense of the democratic principle, the right to self-determination and amnesty".
Junqueras also threw the hook to the post-convergents when he assured that ERC will prioritize pro-independence pacts in municipalities after Sunday's elections, so he offers support for Xavier Trias to win the mayorship of Barcelona.
ERC is fighting against voter demobilization, which on Sunday caused it to lose 300,000 votes in Catalonia. The plebiscitary envelope that the July elections have acquired, with the disjunctive PSOE-PP, poses a new threat to Junqueras' party. Faced with the dichotomy, ERC may receive a new setback at the polls, while Junts capitalizes on the pro-independence vote with a mobilized electorate, as was seen on 28-M. The idea of the "democratic front" was born to prevent the weight from being diluted parliamentarian of the Republicans in Madrid.
The Government assures that Aragonès made his proposal "in full coordination with the party". Hopeful, they claimed that the initiative responded to the need to act: "Without doing anything, we would not encourage people" to vote.
