The negotiators for JuntsxCat (Together for Catalonia) and ERC (Catalan Republican Left) have decided to let the clock run down for a few weeks and postpone the investiture of the president of Catalonia. Nobody wants to say so explicitly, in case the patient pro-independence electorate were to end up rebelling, but the proof is in the continual delays in negotiations: they are always about to conclude but the truth is they never move forward. We really don't know what the problems are, nor if they can be overcome, although obviously they can, since new elections would be a catastrophe. One day people are saying that a resolution is about to be tabled and the ball is passed from one side of the negotiation table to the other and the next day a proposal to modify the Presidency Law is announced in order to invest Carles Puigdemont at a distance.
And when this proposal is brought to Parliament, only one party - JuntsxCat - is present to register it and, politically speaking, it is dead in the water because it will be blocked by one of the Constitutional Court's resolutions. The stubbornness of Puigdemont's group with this particular legislative initiative is, then, surprising.
The fact is that 50 days have gone by since the elections of 21st December, and ten days since parliamentary speaker Roger Torrent suspended the January 30th session for the investiture of Carles Puigdemont pending an effective debate and guarantees for the investiture of the candidate Puigdemont. Meanwhile we await guarantees that do not arrive, spending time in meetings which do not go anywhere but seem to transmit the sensation that something is moving. If it wasn't because the parties are different, this situation, more or less, would be the same as what we already experienced in the winter of 2015 in those endless negotiations between Junts pel Sí — the combined candidature of CDC, ERC and the independents — and the CUP which ended up with Artur Mas stepping aside.
The situation is different but it resembles that previous one and the slow cooking process that the investiture agreement is undergoing between the two major political groups threatens the independence movement's narrative, as the only thing that it transmits is a conflict between two parties, offering no benefits to the politicians who are in the prisons of Estremera and Soto del Real and, finally, weakening the political position of Carles Puigdemont. Because of that it is all the more unjustifiable that they continue playing cat and mouse.