Let's make several things clear: first of all, Catalan independence as a political movement has once again shown its strength on the streets this September 11th by mobilizing at a remarkable level. The fact that there were 115,000 people, as the Barcelona Guardia Urbana says, or 800,000, as the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) estimates, is of course important, but if we average the assessments of some and those of others, we are speaking of several hundred thousand people at a time when the results achieved by their political representatives on July 23rd were nothing to celebrate. Secondly, the demonstration was important but not historic. Nor should we be surprised since we reach this point after a decade of truly spectacular mobilizations on the occasion of the Diada, including one with almost two million attendees, in 2014, and others that surpassed a million participants in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2018, always using figures from the Guardia Urbana, which were systematically lower than those of the ANC.
The major distinguishing feature that already appeared in the political plan of this year's demonstration is its watchdog character. We are not in a phase like that, for example, of 2012, when the result of the Diada led to a Catalan election, or the demonstration of 2014, when the then-president of the ANC, Carme Forcadell, called on Catalan president Artur Mas, with a now-famous phrase -"President, put out the ballot boxes", imploring him to go ahead with the planned November 9th consultation. Now, the scenario is subtly different and this, in part, is due to the different tones of the speeches - the ANC's was not the same as that of Òmnium, the AMI or the Council for the Republic - and the strategies of sovereignist entities and pro-independence parties. As an example: president Carles Puigdemont's refusal to president Pere Aragonès on a joint strategy in Madrid, as requested by the latter in Prada de Conflent this August.
This oversight role is clearly one or even several rungs lower on the ladder than that of those two years in which the Diada was decisive and acted almost as an imperative mandate. Now it is more a matter of wait and see, and of standing by until a move is made by the parties and their leaders, especially president Carles Puigdemont, to whom the results of 23rd July have given pre-eminence when deciding whether there is to be a repeat Spanish election on January 14th or, on the contrary, the investiture, the result of political negotiation, becomes unblocked, with the votes of the seven Junts deputies that Pedro Sánchez needs in order to return to the Moncloa government palace for another four years.
While all this is happening, Spain is beginning to pass through stages that seemed impossible like that of the amnesty, whose debate, at the moment, the PSOE has already reduced to whether or not it can be done before the investiture. It is a major advance, coming as we do from solemn speeches in which an amnesty for independence-process prosecutions was impossible and was outside the Constitution. Even Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena spoke out this Monday in Burgos in favour of debating whether or not it has a place in the Constitution. That seems no small thing given who he is and having presented several extradition orders for president Puigdemont. This is the state that has been reached with the amnesty issue, which certainly still requires a lot of discretion in addition to political courage at a level which we don't know if Sánchez has. The issue of the calendar is not a minor one, since, in essence, it explains how Sánchez wants to appear less of a hostage than he is in the eyes of his own voters and public opinion. But here Junts is not ready to compromise on anything and either there will be an approval in Congress through an urgent reading of the bill before the investiture or we are headed for a repeat election.
With the speed that things are going, the amnesty issue almost seems like a thing of the past and before long we will enter into another of the conditions demanded by Junts once the dropping of the judicial processes is on track. This is what is colloquially called "the mediator" and which could also be considered a verifier, a intermediary, a conciliator, depending on the importance that each side wants to give it. In short, it is a person, or several, who certifies that the agreements made are complied with and that everything does not just remains as words and waste paper. This hurdle will occupy the coming weeks once it becomes clear that the amnesty negotiations are progressing at the expected pace and Sánchez becomes convinced that all of this is not a bluff and the path that would take him to a confrontation with Feijóo again on January 14th is much steeper.