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Just hours after Catalan president Carles Puigdemont returned to Belgium from his eventful trip to the Sardinian city of L'Alguer, where he was first arrested under an illegal arrest warrant that the Spanish Supreme Court still maintains in the European computer archives, and the next day released by the judge of the Court of Appeal of Sassari, Plinia Azzena, comes the start of the first general policy debate led by the new Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, in Barcelona.

A parliamentary debate which, of course, was planned with other political coordinates, and over which old questions  from the toughest years of the independence process have burst like a bombshell: the issues of repression, the persecution of political dissidence, the role of Spain's "deep state" as well as the Spanish government and, ultimately, the permanent violation of European rules and the dishonesty which the Spanish judicial authorities have shown to their colleagues; this time, to those in Luxembourg, as before to Germans and Belgians. 

This is the political context in which the first great parliamentary debate of president Aragonès begins, after the no-less significant difficulties that he had to overcome to win the investiture in Parliament after an extended negotiation between his party the Republican Left (ERC) with Together for Catalonia (Junts). By the way, the German elections held on Sunday, with the close result we have seen between the SPD and the CDU and the complicated political map of parliamentary alliances that is now to be established, surely gives an idea of ​​what a long and intense negotiation can mean, a reflection that could help some people realize that, in countries with a long history of such challenges, forging a good government agreement requires time rather than haste.

In this regard, having overcome the latest crisis between the two partners of the Catalan government - the unresolved composition of the dialogue table with the Spanish government, at which ERC is seated and Junts is not - the parliamentary debate must also serve to demonstrate three things: the unity of the three pro-independence parties in the face of repression by the Spanish state, a government project based on lines offering economic improvement for the country that includes the permanent demand for a solution to the fiscal deficit, and the axes of a negotiation with the state that must overcome or specify how the independence referendum, amnesty and self-determination will be put on track. We will be watching attentively.