In the deserted capital of August, there was no shortage of politicians this year. The nationals, who neither the Madrid rulers nor their own festivities tie to the city. In fact, they treat the castizos with such appreciation that the stellar performance on Friday by San Lorenzo in Lavapiés was a tribute group: 500 nights. Sabine in the veins. They were not even the starting substitutes in the transcript of being Joaquin, Noches sabineras, but a band that traced rubble between recurring appeals to the singer who lives 550 meters from the scene of the festivities, a six-minute walk down Mesón de Paredes. Dreaming that Sabina would be listening to herself and would break into her dressing gown to unite or shut up was the best fantasy of August until Pedro Sanchez he did his own.
For continuing among the saints, La Paloma was walking around collecting itself, on August 15, when Ferraz announced, late in the afternoon: “The PSOE will propose to Francina Armengol for the Presidency of Congress”. That news brought forward The newspaper 24 hours before. And five days before, EL MUNDO reported: “The PSOE is looking for a candidate for president of Congress who likes nationalism.” Ferraz came to crudely certify it, in an official note: “Armengol represents the commitment to coexistence based on dialogue [indultos del procés] and it is also an example of a country that coexists naturally with the richness of the various languages spoken in Spain”.
The PSOE informed of a proposal before the meeting of the Federal Executive Commission which was responsible for proposing and explained the reasons in a stark manner. It took him 36 hours to know why the urgency and that sincerity. The PSOE, that August 15, did not inform society or the militancy of Armengol’s election, not even the members of the Executive Committee, who would thus know what to announce. Ferraz wrote in a distressing way to Carlos Puigdemont. It was his party, Junts, who made it known, early on August 17, that one of his conditions was that the person who presides over the Chamber be “sensitive” towards Catalonia. Sánchez complied with this imperative with the statement of the 15th. Another demand from Junts was: “Catalan in Congress.” And Armengol conceded it in his first speech. He walked the right warning for years of Bolivarianism and the day came: “From this very constitutive session [se podrán usar lenguas cooficiales]”, the former Balearic president proclaimed in full Happening, which hours later (was) clarified: I will have to discuss it with the groups beforehand, assess how to bring it to an end and in which cases, according to the current Regulation or in response to its modification.
The principle of agreement published by Junts included a third section referring to language, the request to the EU for the use of Catalan in community institutions, and a dimension, without specifying to which point it referred: “There are some fringes left”. The “fringes” bring us back to Sánchez. Who is he talking to? Who does he write for?
On Wednesday he met his deputies for the first time. And when he had been speaking for 19 minutes and 16 seconds, he revealed: “I want to make the announcement to you…”. He took the fifth acclamation after promising: “We are going to promote their use (of the co-official languages) in the community institutions”. He did not speak for his parliamentarians, he spoke for Puigdemont, since only the former president and the negotiators knew about what. In the previous weeks, Yolanda Diaz he fueled the Catalan issue, but limited to Congress. The EU? Before Sánchez cited her, nobody slipped that demand of Junts or an interest of the PSOE in it. It was not difficult to interpret that the president’s announcement was a wink on the edge to Puigdemont. But it turned out to be more interesting to verify that neither the word “commitment” nor the first person – “that I am going to deploy during the presidency of the EU” – were enough. That morning, the fled had demanded “verifiable facts” to give his votes. Sánchez must have thought: What better “fact” than my public “commitment”? He didn’t take long to learn that his word is worth nothing to a fugitive. His promise in Congress failed to break the resistance at Waterloo.