After a weekend of statements that were halfway between disconcerting and disturbing, from this Monday we will know the pace that the acting Spanish prime minister wants to set in his second investiture. As he did in the negotiation of the Congressional Bureau, he has taken refuge in silence, which gave him such a good return, and has sent his collaborators, starting with the minister Félix Bolaños, to do the spade work in search of the votes he needs, and which speak Catalan. Slow progress, they say here. Without falling asleep, they say in Madrid.
The Austrian philosopher and linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted that for those things we cannot talk about, we must maintain silence. And he was right. A serious negotiation is never resolved through statements by one side or the other to the media, even though in Catalan politics there is always an innate tendency to talk too much, which I have always attributed to the lack of knowledge and inexperience that exists with regard to the exercise of real power. Jordi Pujol, who was the king of statements when he wanted to mark out the territory, used to say in private that the political Catalonia had been built, in the absence of having its own Official State Gazette, on the basis of speeches, the public television channel TV3 and a permanent confrontation that was sometimes more subtle and sometimes less, depending on the political arithmetic.
Two politicians from the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Together for Catalonia (Junts), Marta Rovira and Laura Borràs, have been, to say the least, not very neat in separate public statements they have made. This, on the eve of tackling the complex issue of the amnesty which continues to be left lying like a sleeping dog in the Spanish government palace even though politicians, media and columnists of the Spanish left are all intensively reviewing things that might have been said in the past to prepare the ground, like good sappers, for the negotiation.
It was not necessary for Rovira to point out that "an amnesty law should, conceptually, be an end point of the political conflict", since even the adversary knows that this will not be the case. That the conflict will continue to exist because it carried on in the Generalitat even when José Montilla was president. Nor was Borràs right when she defended, following the line taken by Míriam Nogueras, that an amnesty law should include her, sentenced by the Catalan High Court to 4 and a half years in prison and a 13-year ban from office for abuse of authority when she was director of the Institute of Catalan Letters. Building the house from the roof downwards is never a good idea and standing in front of it, talking about one's self, isn't either.