With many of the negotiation topics well advanced - it is still necessary, for example, to decide on the coordination of the parliamentary groups in Madrid - and others precariously held up by small sticking points but with a certain accord - the Council for the Republic set alongside the allowance of two years to try and explore the limits of negotiation with Madrid - and the vast majority of the conflictive questions in the government well on track, the leaders of the Republican Left (ERC) and Together for Catalonia (Junts) will sit down face-to-face today with the apparent intention of giving an extra push to the negotiation for a new Catalan government arising from the pro-independence majority in the February 14th elections.
In addition to the ERC president, Oriol Junqueras, imprisoned in Lledoners, also present at the pro-independence conclave will be, among others, the two top leaders of the major parties, on whom an important part of the negotiation rests: Pere Aragonès, in his condition as indisputable candidate for president as the representative of ERC, the largest pro-independence party in the elections with its 33 seats, and Jordi Sànchez, general secretary of Junts who carries the baton for the organization of Carles Puigdemont and, in these last few weeks, has occupied the entire political space of his party in the negotiations. Aragonès and Sànchez, who have kept up a fluid dialogue by telephone despite the disagreements that have taken place between the two parties at the negotiating table, have one thing in common: the former has already stated that he does not want to be a president who is guided from outside, something that, in the phrased coined under the previous legislature, president Quim Torra came to define as a "vicarious president"; nor does Jordi Sànchez have the role of "vicarious secretary" and, as ERC has already been able to verify, his autonomy in many of the decisions is important.
No one expects a final agreement from this Tuesday's meeting, but some preparations can be made for a definitive push. The conclave will also address the structure of the new government, into which the decisionmakers are required to fit the three new ministries - Feminism, Climate Change and Universities - that ERC wants to incorporate and that, surely, for a balanced distribution will have to be merged with some of the existing ones. The fusion which seems most likely is Justice with Interior. But even all this has more guess work in it than it seems to many, as the question of which 50% of the government each party is entitled to will be neither simple nor easy.
The point being that, in the end, coalition governments have enormous complexity and the memory of what has happened between ERC and Junts since 2017 does not help an agreement to be rapidly concluded without going into the final details. The absence of coalition governments for decades in Catalonia has generated a false idea of what such negotiations are. Power is obviously discussed and its distribution. And the contention between the parties involved sometimes cuts that go a little deeper than surface scratches, as it may be necessary to make painful concessions: the act of "stepping aside" by Artur Mas after the CUP vetoed him was one such exceptional situation, and was only understandable by his desire to save the independence process. Obviously, now the situation is not so extreme and ERC has closed an agreement with the CUP that does not on its own allow it to govern, but does ensure that the posture of the anti-capitalists is not a problem. A document that Junts will amend in some respects, for sure.
The meeting of Lledoners, which the unionist parties criticize, has one great virtue: to demonstrate that the police, judicial and political repression in Catalonia continues and that unfortunately political agreements cannot be made in total liberty, there being, as there are, political prisoners.