On the verge of 2022, more than a hundred days after the unproductive meeting held in the Palau de la Generalitat, the spokespersons of PSOE and Podemos avoided this Monday the warnings of both Catalan president Pere Aragonès and leader of Esquerra Republicana, Oriol Junqueras, who, on Saint Stephen's Day, claimed for the Spanish government to get its act together and unblock the existing political conflict. Aragonès used the New Year’s Eve televised presidential speech to introduce a not at all subtle change of register in the language used to date, and defended the need to start building alternatives in case the negotiation with the State ran aground and did not bring the results Esquerra hoped for.
It is 103 days since that summit between governments, which decided a meeting would take place though not when. Initially, it seemed it would be towards the end of the year and later at the beginning of 2022. Reasonably, by now it should have been scheduled and the agenda, not an abstract one, already known. Far from it, both the PSOE’s spokesperson, Felipe Sicilia, and the parliamentary spokesperson of Unidas Podemos, Pablo Echenique, with the excuse of the evolution of the pandemic, asked Aragonès not to set deadlines to the dialogue via the media. One way as any other to avoid the issue and the pressure exerted by Aragonès and Junqueras.
Esquerra has done well in opening the can of worms of the second meeting of the dialogue table, surely aware that after the holidays (which end on January 6th, Kings’ Day in Spain) this will be a recurrent topic mentioned in all press conferences. Both in interventions by ERC’s spokespersons as well as those by the Catalan Government. Also by Junts per Catalunya, left out of the dialogue table since Pere Aragonès vetoed those leaders of Carles Puigdemont’s party who were not members of the Catalan executive, whom the party intended to propose as its representatives. Junts proposed Jordi Sànchez, Jordi Turull, Miriam Nogueras and Jordi Puigneró. Puigneró was accepted due to his condition of vice-president of the Catalan Government.
In any case, the PSOE, with State budgets approved, and two years of legislature left —if elections are not called sooner—, will be tempted to let the dialogue proceed at a snail’s pace, hoping that any unforeseen event will put an end to it and serve as an excuse to move past it. This pace is exactly the opposite of what Esquerra needs, all the more so at a time when the CUP has fallen out of the parliamentary majority after it voted against the Generalitat’s budgets. It will now need commitments and incentives from ERC to rejoin. Something that today is not exactly easy.