There is a shared impression on the pro-independence side that the negotiations for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez are progressing so slowly that they could be considered stalled with just over a month left until the deadline for the socialist to be anointed expires. The added circumstance that the PSOE is negotiating disparate demands with Junts and ERC, as their votes are equally essential, adds difficulty to an agreement that the two great separatist forces want to claim.
The post-convergents insist on this controversial figure for two reasons: its acceptance would facilitate the internationalization of the “conflict between Catalonia and Spain”, placing the region and the State on an equal footing, as if they were two sovereign actors settling their political status. The second reason is that there is an atrocious fear in Junts that Sánchez will end up betraying the investiture agreement, refusing to negotiate the holding of a new referendum when he is already resting in La Moncloa. The heirs of Convergència always accused ERC of helping the PSOE in exchange for nothing. They did so despite the granting of pardons and the suppression of the crime of sedition. So the bar is high and this leads Puigdemont to want an external figure to attest to the degree of compliance with the investiture pact and the progress towards self-determination that occurs throughout the legislature.
The PSOE counteroffer continues to involve the creation of a monitoring commission to evaluate the development of the investiture agreement. The socialists do not want to hear about the figure of the rapporteur, who has already dynamited the negotiation of the 2019 General Budgets and led Sánchez to call elections.
But the, for the moment, irreconcilable differences between the socialists and Junts do not end there. If we return to Brussels at the beginning of September, we will remember that Puigdemont emphasized that his had to be a “historic” agreement, the most relevant in which Catalonia has been involved since 1714, the founding date of Catalan separatism. How to put that on paper also separates Sánchez and the former president of the Generalitat at the moment. The president who organized the 1st October and unilaterally declared independence from the Parliament demands that the Government reflect the “national recognition” of Catalonia in the agreement and that the State ask for “forgiveness” from the already recognized Catalan nation in the preamble of the amnesty law, accepting that the State erred in its actions to stop the illegal referendum of 2017 and that it carried out “judicial persecution” against the independence movement in the following years.
Puigdemont was referring to all of this when he set the “recognition of the democratic legitimacy of the independence movement” as the first condition for the agreement. To that and to other requests already fulfilled, such as asking Europol to disassociate Catalan secessionism and terrorism, something that the Ministry of the Interior has already demanded, as EL MUNDO revealed.