After weeks, months, of biting his tongue, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy, Joseph Borrell, spoke out this Monday about the agreement signed by the PSOE with Junts and ERC to invest Pedro Sánchez as president of the Government. “I am aware of the political agreements reached with two pro-independence parties and certainly those agreements cause me some concern or quite a few concerns,” he stated, without wanting to go into evaluating the matter in greater depth. “It is logical because it is a difficult problem on which at the time, not now, I will express myself,” he added.
It is not a comfortable phase for the veteran socialist leader, who headed the PSOE lists in the last European elections and who for years, as a minister or not, fought with the independence movement, led constitutional demonstrations in Barcelona or published books to demonstrate, with accounts, “the stories” of the sovereigntist story. Borrell does not support much of the content of these agreements, and especially the revision of the entire narrative of the Procés, which he suffered firsthand. But he does not want to blow up the investiture negotiations.
“It is evident that I cannot mix my role with personal considerations regarding a problem of Spanish domestic politics,” the head of European diplomacy justified for not going into the matter in-depth. But he wanted to add: “Everyone who knows me in Spain and knows my personal and previous political career can imagine what I think.. And without yet knowing the Amnesty Law because I know it (I know that it has been published today but I have been locked up in the Council and these days I have been terribly busy with the problems of my function) but without knowing the Law in detail I cannot pronounce,” he said in Brussels.
Borrell is against paying any price for the investiture, but he remains what he is within the party, and that is why he has remained silent and prefers to respond cryptically. Crystalline, very clear, but cryptic. “It does not mean that I do not have my opinion and that at some point I will express it, because I have the full right to do so without involving the European institutions in any way. Certainly here and now is not the time,” Borrell elaborated.
The moment is delicate and while it is true that it was the press conference of a European meeting where topics as relevant as Gaza or Ukraine were discussed, it was not the appropriate place, the truth is that he could have already intervened in any forum. or format.