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Esquerra now has the backing of its members for Pedro Sánchez's investiture: if PSOE doesn't accept their terms of a negotiating table between the two governments, Spanish and Catalan, without red lines, with a specific timeline and guarantees of automatic compliance review, the acting prime minister won't be able to count on the essential thirteen ERC delegates to be re-elected. Then Sánchez will have to turn to the path of Ciudadanos or the Partido Popular.

Of the 8,500 ERC members able to vote, almost 95% of those who did supported the position of party leadership to vote 'no' to the investiture unless there's an abrupt change of the current political paradigm. The parties led by Sánchez and Oriol Junqueras now have mandates from their respective organisations to start to negotiate, although it won't be quick.

Everyone needs time to change their rhetoric and two weeks from the 10th November election seem insufficient. In the last serious negotiations, those in 1996 headlined by the then decisive Catalan nationalism of CiU, Anzar and Pujol needed time to play down the "Pujol enano, habla castellano" ("Pujol, titch, speak Spanish") of the night of the election and move to that declaration of love, as false as it was unnecessary, to the Catalan language the PP leader made on TV3: "I have to say that I read Catalan, understand it and, when I'm in limited circles, not very large, I speak it too". Later it was learnt that that was one of Pujol's unavoidable conditions: for Aznar to convince his parish that nothing would be done against the Catalan language and immersion.

When we hear PSC these days questioning linguistic immersion, one cannot stop thinking about that transaction in 1996, with the difference that maybe what PSC has done is to cause an unnecessary fire to feign a later concession. Who knows. PSC has an apparatus prepared for everything, as in their latest congressional proposal to recognise Catalonia as a nation and Spain as a plurinational state. That was overturned by the Constitutional Court from the 2006 Statute of Autonomy and 13 years later what the Catalan PSOE affiliate are proposing is to start from the same place and, on both occasions, with a prime minister from their party in the Moncloa government palace in Madrid. In short, roads to nowhere.