The independence movement of Catalonia seeks unity to negotiate with the PSOE | The two main Catalan parties are negotiating possible support for Pedro Sánchez in Spain

2023-08-01 05:01:00

One of the two major Catalan independence parties, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) proposed to the other, Junts per Catalunya, to overcome differences and jointly negotiate support for the investiture of the socialist Pedro Sánchez as president of the Spanish government, in exchange for advancing towards a secession referendum. “We sincerely extend our hand,” ERC said in a letter addressed to Junts and published in the Catalan newspaper Ara.

In Spain’s tight parliamentary elections on July 23, Sánchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE) came second, with 121 seats, behind Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s Popular Party (PP) with 137. But the socialist has a better chance of gathering the necessary support to invest his candidate as president of the government.

For this, he would need, among others, the favorable votes of the seven ERC deputies, a more moderate independence formation that already supported the Socialists in the last legislature, and the seven from Junts per Catalunya, the party of the refugee leader in Belgium Carles Puigdemont, who until now is opposed to supporting any of the Spanish parties.

“Today the PSOE does not have any other alternative majority. We have a lever of force that we must know how to take advantage of together, to advance, to build” a path “towards amnesty and self-determination,” explained the group led by Gabriel Rufián in its letter . The requested amnesty would benefit those accused of the 2017 secessionist attempt, including Puigdemont, who has not yet been tried because he settled in Belgium.

ERC and Junts governed the region of Catalonia together from a few years before those events and until October 2022, when the differences led them to break their coalition. Puigdemont’s party accuses the Republicans of having achieved nothing with their conciliatory stance with the PSOE and Sánchez, but they reply that the pardon of nine Catalan pro-independence leaders in 2021 and the repeal of the main crime that landed them in jail — that of sedition– are the fruit of his negotiations with Madrid.

“Secret” meeting of Feijóo with Abascal

Negotiations to guarantee governability continue and the acting Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, demanded this Monday that Alberto Núñez Feijóo clarify “the details” of the “secret” meeting he had with Santiago Abascal in the middle of last week.

“We know that he is ashamed of the photos with his ally Abascal, but then they agree to cut rights where they govern without contemplation or shame,” Alegría stated on her Twitter account, alluding to the autonomous communities in which PP and Vox came to government agreements, as in the Valencian Community or Extremadura. The minister responded to a message posted on Twitter by Feijóo, in which she warned President Sánchez that she will not accept “that half of the Spaniards are intended to become a minority.”