Really, there is little room to think that the way in which the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has proposed the Spanish-French summit, being held this Thursday in Barcelona, is anything other than a provocation. The bellicosity expressed in recent days, not exempt from a point of bravado, regarding the treatment that will be given to the president of Catalonia during the meeting; the government ministers turned into parrots of an unreal political normalization in Catalonia and the end of the independence process; and this very Wednesday, the icing on the cake, with the Spanish state's solicitors aligning themselves with the tougher positions taken by the public prosecutors over judge Pablo Llarena's interlocutory decree on the reformulation of the extradition orders for president Carles Puigdemont, among others. All this is not a coincidence. Making the odd slip-up is always possible, but raising the temperature of the summit unnecessarily can only be part of a strategy that most likely arises from Sánchez already having entered election campaign mode - and when he does that he has neither friends nor allies.
Since we all know how these gestures work in politics, it is neither a coincidence nor a necessity that the Spanish government has been minimizing the role of Aragonès in the Spanish-French summit for days and explaining that he will only be present at the protocol reception of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, with the footnote that this is the same treatment as for any autonomous community president or mayor of a hosting venue. This was not the case of another summit held in 2006, on that occasion in the city of Girona, which no one wants to remember now when setting a precedent, when the-then Catalan president Pasqual Maragall succeeded - after using the tenacity which often characterized him - in extracting a much more lustrous status from José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, at the time when Jacques Chirac occupied the Élysée palace.
Nor is there a coincidence in the Spanish government's offensive aimed at jolting the independence movement through the Puigdemont issue. It was in line with the fire started by the parliamentary leader of the PSOE, Patxi López, and fanned by, among others, the minister for the PM's department, Félix Bolaños, the cabinet spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, and the minister of the treasury, María Jesús Montero. The last-named, in referring to the statements of Llarena and the prosecutors and to the fact that they apply the aggravated variant of the misuse of funds crime to maintain a high sentence, commented that it shows that the Socialists are right when they assert that the reform of the Penal Code has not decriminalized misuse of funds and has even toughened the penalties for corruption-related crimes. And she added, in reply to Spain's public broadcaster, that she hoped that with the new court documents, president Puigdemont "can be extradited to our country and can answer before justice very soon". Very soon.
But, surely, all the doubts that there may be regarding the position of the Spanish government on the issue in reforming the Penal Code have been cleared up with the submission from the state solicitors' office. If a little surprising was that of the prosecutors - by a government whose PM has been quoted as uttering, even if it involved a touch of bluster, expressions like "Who do the public prosecutors depend on? The government, no? Well, there you are" - then what leaves no room for doubt is the 14-page document signed by Rosa María Seoane. Here the obedience is unavoidable, as was seen in the case of Edmundo Bal, who resigned as head of the criminal department of the state solicitors' office, before joining Ciudadanos, when the Sánchez government forced him to withdraw the accusation of rebellion from the independence process prisoners and leave them with "only" charges of sedition.
It is a document that, like that of the public prosecutors, could show the way to a 17-year prison sentence for Puigdemont if he were extradited and the Supreme Court accepted its proposals with respect to the reformed Penal Code. Pedro Sánchez arrives in Catalonia with all these bargaining chips. The risk he runs is that in seeking to reunite with the Spain he has lost, he ends up losing the part of Catalonia he thinks he has. This Thursday's demonstration in Montjuïc, at the start of the Spanish-French summit, takes a position against all of that and aims to show that the independence movement is still alive, no matter how many times its last rites have been read.