“Always before, if not they don't pay.” Junts per Catalunya does not move from the conditions posed by the former president of the Government, Carles Puigdemont, when from Brussels he pointed out the need for the amnesty law to be approved before an investiture - predictably by Pedro Sánchez - a condition that the post-convergent insist in “charging in advance” against ERC, which opens the door for the law to at least be in process in Congress, but not definitively approved, when Sánchez is up for re-election in the Lower House.
The idea that the deadlines for approving the norm are so tight that they make it difficult to comply with Puigdemont's condition is gaining ground. They feed it especially from Sumar, where the spokesperson Ernest Urtasun, and the party's interlocutor with Puigdemont, Jaume Asens, have recently admitted the difficulty of carrying it out in such a short period of time and have demanded "not to become obsessed with deadlines." But at Junts they are not willing to give in.
Aware of this difficulty, the ERC spokesperson in Congress, Teresa Jordà, yesterday admitted the possibility that, if the law is not approved in Congress in time before Sánchez's inauguration, there will at least be a “firm commitment ” and a calendar for its parliamentary validation. Her words, in an interview on RNE, have been qualified this Thursday by her party. Republican sources consider that the “interpretation” that has been made of his words admits nuances: “That the amnesty law enters before the investiture is entirely viable,” warn ERC sources, who thus claim that at least The law begins its parliamentary processing before Sánchez's inauguration.
At ERC they consider that “it is a matter of political will” and that “it has nothing to do with processing deadlines.” Furthermore, they insist that the amnesty is only “a starting point and at the same time insufficient for votes in an eventual investiture.”
At Junts, however, they are exhaustive. “Either in advance, or you don't charge,” they claim, recalling the precedents after agreements with the Government in areas such as budgets, the third additional provision of the Statute, or infrastructures. And "Puigdemont set the negotiating framework" when he placed the amnesty law as a "previous" condition and "we will not move from here," they insist.
The post-convergents do not value ERC's position on the matter, but the argument of the lack of time to approve the norm before the investiture is not valid either: “They have had six years to do it,” they say. Precisely, Junts spokesperson Xavier Rius has pointed out the need to "get paid in advance" in the negotiation with the PSOE in his reaction from the Parliament on the sentencing of former councilor Miquel Buch for Puigdemont's bodyguard, which has earned him a sentence of four and a half years in prison. Faced with this "barbarity" and "savage", Rius has justified the position of his party: "Does anyone doubt that we ask to be paid in advance."
