It is quite a curious occurrence that, in order to correct the mistrust of Pedro Sánchez that exists in many sectors of the left, the Spanish prime minister has decided to make use of his Socialist predecessor in the office, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who occupied the Moncloa between 2004 and 2011. Zapatero is thus doing some preparatory spade work before the campaign proper begins, to try and clean up the image the PM has as a liar, and to advocate for his policies in two areas that are as difficult as they are controversial: relations with the Catalan and Basque independentists, and social improvements, particularly, the defence of feminist policies.
You don't need to go any further than this point to see how times have changed: the man who promised us, in 2004, that Catalonia would have the new Statute of Autonomy that the Catalans wanted, was able to watch two years later as the-then president of Congress's constitutional committee proclaimed with such pride: "We have trimmed down the Statute". It was the first dilution of the statutory text, and a few years later, the Constitutional Court, also on Zapatero's prime ministerial watch, did the well-known demolition job on the document in 2010. Since time erases all kinds of errors from political biographies and later Sánchez was able to appear, Zapatero is able to give an impeccable performance in this warm-up act centred on the non-existent dialogue between Spain and Catalonia.
Thus, he advocates for the "normalizing" of the return of Catalan president Carles Puigdemont through "a path of respect for justice" to "return to the situation" prior to his exile. A sentence which in its literalness is unintelligible, and which really doesn't allow you to know what he wants to say, because I doubt greatly that normalizing his return means that he can return to Catalonia when he wants to. It would have been better, in his thinking, if he first spent time in Estremera prison and came back after several years in prison. Zapatero's proclaimed wish, expressed in the interview on Catalonia's TV3, for concord, dialogue and reconciliation, hits a highly discordant note when heard over the on-going rumbling of hundreds, even thousands of people who are in involved in legal proceedings that threaten bans on office holding, economic punishment or imprisonment for cases that they go back to the period between 2017 and 2019.
As the saying goes, things are much easier said than done. To speak of things like negotiation and dialogue tables is, in theory, to put yourself on the path of a solution. But not if the meaning of those expressions is perverted so frequently that it all turns into empty phrases that lose their value. The only thing that has really happened has been the nine pardons granted to the Catalan political prisoners - with a lot of mediation, it must be said, from European pressure, creating a level of discomfort with the situation and with the prospect of Spain's presidency of the EU during this semester - which, evidently, was a turning point for nine people unjustly convicted and facing decades in prison. Obviously, there was nothing in this that bore any relation to the solution of the political conflict, nor with the problems of all kinds that are faced by all those waiting in the corridors of Spanish justice.
In any case, Zapatero, who has been attributed much of the credit for having managed to end the days of the Basque terrorist group ETA under his prime ministership - a fact that is objectively unquestionable - has never denied that he would be willing to mediate for a solution if he was given a lever to support it on. In the end, in politics, levers are the ability to pressure Spanish governments and that window of opportunity would occur if PP and Vox don't win the seats for an absolute majority on 23rd July. And if the pro-independence parties were given the opportunity, and were able to and wanted to take advantage of it, under the premise, very difficult, of: it's this or nothing.