Former Catalan regional president Carles Puigdemont announced he would hold a meeting in Brussels to define his party Junts per Catalunya’s framework to open formal negotiations with the PSOE and would set the terms of the talks.
After the Spanish general election held on 23 July produced no clear majorities, the seven deputies of centre-right pro-independence Junts Per Catalunya (JXCat) now have the key to a new progressive executive of the Socialist party (PSOE/S&D) and the new left-wing platform Sumar.
However, JXCat and its political rival, the left-wing separatist Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), have set several conditions to vote in favour of Sánchez for a new term of the socialist candidate as Spain’s prime minister, among them a referendum on Catalonia’s independence.
However, no one on either side is currently holding formal “talks” with any party, as suggested by several Spanish media, Puigdemont, the leader of JxCat, wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Meanwhile, the acting Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, reacted to Puigdemont’s words and pointed out that the government’s talks to bring forward an investiture of Pedro Sánchez are “discreet”, stressing that once the agreements have been reached they are “made public”, never before.
A meeting in Brussels to define the “Catalan agenda”
Puigdemont, who is on the run from Spanish justice in Waterloo since 2017 following the failed illegal referendum on Catalonia’s independence held the same year, announced that on 5 September, he will have a meeting in Brussels to define the JXCat framework to open formal negotiations with the PSOE.
The JxCat executive board confirmed Thursday in a meeting held in Tarragona that Puigdemont will personally set the negotiation terms.
“Normal contacts” with other parties
Puigdemont explained that the discussions JxCat is holding with other parties “are conversations that the party already had” during the last legislature, in which the party “lived without the option of participating in any negotiations by decision of the political actors who are now asking to talk”, so he asked not to compare these conversations with a formal political negotiation.
He also mentioned the reform that he plans to carry out in the so-called Council of the (Catalan) Republic, a parallel institutional body that he personally leads from Belgium, and has disassociated it “from the possible negotiations that may be undertaken” by Junts Per Catalunya in Barcelona or Madrid with PSOE.
Meanwhile, in an interview aired by private television channel Telecinco, the acting government’s spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez (PSOE), reiterated that a referendum of independence for Catalonia has never been on the executive´s table. The government only negotiates “in the framework of the Spanish Constitution”, she added.
(Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.EURACTIV.es)
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