So, that's it then: Javier Lambán has won the duel with Pere Aragonès. His permanent and electorally profitable anti-Catalan campaign has been rewarded, albeit by the method of derailing the Catalan candidacy. The government of Aragón, with all the trickery and deceit it could muster and unsportsman-like behaviour until the last minute, has won the match over Catalonia. There will be no bid from the Pyrenees for the 2030 Winter Olympics because Lambán wanted half of the cake, which was sufficient to condemn a candidacy that was based on the weight of the Barcelona brand and allowed Aragón to add a sixth defeat to its five previous failed initiatives for the Olympics of 1998, 2002, 2010, 2014 (the time it got closest) and 2022. In the end, realpolitik was imposed shamelessly and, whether willingly or not, the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) waved the rojigualda flag in its judgement: it was a Spanish candidacy and thus one territory (Catalonia) could not beat the other (Aragón). For those naive observers who were waiting for a white flag and for the best possible technical decision to be made, it has become clear that, at least in Madrid, you don't bite the hand that feeds you and all efforts to save the Socialist administration of Lambán are welcome.
A source who was inside the negotiations saw it very clearly: rightly or wrongly, we will not condemn Lambán a year before the elections. In a convoluted way, if you will, those who were opposed to the Games because of their powerful charge of Spanish nationalism ended up being proved right. And those who argued that it was positive for the territory and an opportunity to recover from decades of abandonment by centralist Barcelona have ended up being trampled on by the COE and Pedro Sánchez - because the prime minister has a lot to say in these cases. The famous "agenda for the re-encounter" - that empty phrase with which the Spanish government hoped to turn the page on the independence movement - is leaving behind it a series of disagreements that go from infrastructure investments that were never fulfilled despite the billion-Euro promises, to the withdrawal of the promised expansion of El Prat airport if AENA's approach was not accepted.
Not to mention the dialogue table that has never met - in this year's midsummer festa of Sant Joan, it might as well be heaved onto the bonfire like one more old piece of furniture - or Catalangate, the largest known case of illegal espionage at international level, which has been used to investigate the Catalan independence movement, including president Aragonès, and in this case, moreover, not through the illegal operations of Spain's "state sewers", but officially, through an explicit request by the CNI intelligence agency to a Supreme Court judge. This Wednesday, Catalan presidency minister Laura Vilagrà will meet with her Spanish counterpart, Félix Bolaños, to "address the blockade between the two governments following the Pegasus case". A very commendable mission, as it cannot be easy to sit down with someone who has spied on you, who won't give your Catalan boss an appointment to meet with his Spanish boss, and who has smashed to smithereens ERC's commitment to reach an understanding with the PSOE. Yes, of course, politics tends to be like that, but sometimes even your enemy lets you breathe.
The meeting between Vilagrà and Bolaños takes place in the middle of an issue that does not appear on any political agenda, which, obviously, has not been officially discussed, but which is being talked about these days in Madrid and Barcelona: will the Supreme Court amend its doctrine and return the Catalan political prisoners to prison, revoking the partial and revocable pardon granted by the government of Pedro Sánchez in June 2021, a year ago this very Wednesday? It should be impossible, but no one with any insight into the conversations taking place in senior judicial circles is willing to bet that it won't end up happening. The pardons were the great political agreement between the PSOE and ERC and the one that has ended up guaranteeing the parliamentary stability of Pedro Sánchez. Faced with the hypothesis of a new entry into prison, would Sánchez proceed to activate a new set of pardons?