The speaker of the Catalan Parliament, Roger Torrent, has travelled to Brussels to meet president Puigdemont and the four ministers exiled in Belgium: Toni Comín, Clara Ponsatí, Meritxell Serret y Lluís Puig. The five are deputies in the Parliament of Catalonia and one of them, Puigdemont, is the candidate proposed by the parties holding an absolute majority in the chamber for the presidential investiture debate to be held Tuesday 30th January. It is not, therefore, strange, that Torrent should travel to the heart of the European Union, nor is it that he should visit the deputies still in prison -Oriol Junqueras and Jordi Sànchez- and minister Joaquim Forn, who has just resigned his seat to try and help his appeal for release from preventive detention.
The fact that there are other parliamentary groups protesting does not, really, have any importance on this matter. It's not a question of parties, however much PP, Ciutadans and PSC want to make it so, but of the required dignity of the institution. Or, at least, of a way of seeing it, distant from the one held by the pro-union parties. In any case, nor is it strange that those who enthusiastically applauded the dissolution of the Parliament carried out by Mariano Rajoy should now be scandalised that there is a wish to respect the public mandate from the ballot boxes on 21st December. While they're being surprised, two things particularly call my attention: that the Parliament's speaker should have paid for the trip from his own pocket and that the Spanish government should have locked shut the Catalan government delegation to Brussels to try and prevent the meeting.
I don't know whether it was lawyers from the Catalan Parliament that advised the speaker that, to avoid problems, he should bear the expenses of his ticket and so avoid a hypothetical charge of misuse of public funds. If it were so, the blame wouldn't fall on the lawyers. To assume his whole role as representative of the institution and to look out for, as he's said, the 135 deputies means travelling to Brussels and Estremera and Soto del Real prisons, charging to the Parliament's budget. The alternative is to accept that it falls outside of the job he holds and, as such, a personal, not an institutional, act. Informing the candidate for the presidency of the proposal of the Parliament's speaker is, obviously, not a personal act.
Nor is it appropriate for an institution of the Catalan government -as their delegation in Brussels is- to not allow the Parliament's speaker to hold a meeting with someone, in this case, president Puigdemont. Maybe, for the Spanish government, Roger Torrent isn't the representative of the second institution of Catalonia and doesn't merit, as a result, a treatment in accordance with his rank? Is Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs not prepared to recognise the president of the new Parliament? As far as we know, the election hasn't been contested by the Spanish government.
The state of panic some seem to have entered into in the desperate search of public sewerage tunnels which Carles Puigdemont could supposedly use to get into the Ciutadella park and the Parliament building, has minister Zoido at the head of a unique police operation. To not mention a somewhat comical one. All this one the same day that the former secretary general of the Valencian PP, Ricardo Costa, has caused an enormous ruckus in his former party with the topic of corruption. To hide it, there's nothing better than stirring up the news around the Catalan question. It's an old strategy and there's nothing worse than falling for it.