Just weeks after Pedro Sánchez took power through a confidence motion, with the indispensable support of Catalan pro-independence parties, the vain prime minister received the Catalan president, Quim Torra, at the Moncloa palace. A meeting rather out of obligation but which opened a three-way channel of communication between deputy Spanish prime minister Carmen Calvo, Catalan vice-president Pere Aragonès and the then Catalan presidency minister, Elsa Artadi. For months, Calvo, Aragonès and Artadi had a WhatsApp group, which acts as a sort of guide to those months: from the preparations for the famous Pedralbes meeting (autumn 2018), the different drafts for the meeting between Sánchez and Torra to include the reference to the existence of a conflict over the future of Catalonia (December 2018), the figure of the rapporteur (February 2019) and the negotiations for and failure of the Spanish budget (one week later).
Calvo, plenipotentiary in the Moncloa, albeit with less power than her predecessor Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, applied against the pro-independence leaders a policy of sudden bursts of speed and then braking, based on the media impact of the proposals under discussion. The WhatsApp group had days of surprising silence and stopped, or at least this first phase did, with the failure of the budget after a tightening of the screws from the deputy PM which the independence supporters didn't accept, although they did express their unequivocal wish to continue negotiating. Although the Catalan side has always been discrete, they did have the feeling, at least in those days, that the Moncloa had been playing with them and that the decision to go to an election was firm. And it was. It's a different matter that the ones who took the heat for the calling of an election in April were ERC and JxCat because they rejected the budget.
I've remembered different conversations from those months hearing talk this Monday about the Spanish government's management of Open Arms and how they messed around its boat, first offering them to disembark in Algeciras (far from the closest Spanish port and, what a coincidence, a town government by PP, Cs and Vox); second, course-correcting to the Balearic Islands and then blaming everything on the Italian government, which isn't entirely blameless, but that doesn't excuse Spain's pitiful humanitarian management. Òscar Camps says that Carmen Calvo wants to sell them as the baddies in the story and tells flagrant lies like that Open Arms refused to disembark in Malta.
Unidas Podemos also ran across the deputy prime minister when a document from the party during negotiations for Sánchez's investiture as prime minister was manipulated in the Moncloa, changing where it said "proposals" to "demands" when it was sent to the media. They are only three examples, but all with different second parties. Perhaps it's that Calvo has got too accustomed to saying one thing and doing another, with great help, sometimes, from a certain news blackout.