The decision by Òmnium's president, Jordi Cuixart, to request that the organisation be received within the round of meetings that the acting PM, Pedro Sánchez, intends to hold with civil society bodies, to look for support to help him unblock his investiture, is a smart and clever play in the ever-complex puzzle of interests, not always coincident, of the pro-independence parties. Cuixart is thus strengthening his role as a dialogue party over any other attribute, even in such an unfair situation as the one he is in, from his pre-trial detention in which he has already been 660 nights sleeping in prison.
The Spanish government’s spokespersons do not want to hear about Cuixart’s letter, which is partly logical, since the entities summoned will eventually be dependent on state aid on one way or another, which is a different circumstance to that of Òmnium, which lives exclusively from the fees of its more than 170,000 members. In addition to this, it is also true that Òmnium is an entity that has been key in the rise of the pro-independence movement, in the organisation of the mass demonstrations held in Catalonia and in the incorporation of civil disobedience as one of the solutions after the sentences of the Supreme Court.
The consensus that Cuixart holds within the Catalan pro-independence world and the social position of an entity created in 1961, in the middle of the dictatorship, should lead Pedro Sánchez not to offer an easy manual response to satisfy PP and Cs, apparently, the only ones that the PSOE does not want to disturb. Easy things are always the enemy of correct ones. Filling the news with unions and employers associations alike serves the purpose of giving a false image of dialogue and to try and pressure Pablo Iglesias a little. But no investiture shall emerge from that. And neither it will from the King escaping his institutional role and advocating the end of the institutional blockade, a way of advocating for Sánchez’s investiture.
The courageous thing, what Adolfo Suárez1 would have done, is to try and find out what Cuixart means when he says "We will do it again". Then people did politics, but today, they simply go through the motions.
1. Adolfo Suárez was the first Spanish prime minister to be elected democratically after the end of the Franco regime.