Fumata bianca. Together for Catalonia (Junts), the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Spanish Socialists (PSOE) have made public an agreement to introduce amendments to the amnesty bill. That has been announced this Wednesday evening by the three parties in a joint statement less than 24 hours before the meeting of the congressional justice committee that has to debate and vote on the new wording of the legislation. However, the independentists and Socialists do not reveal the detail of the changes or clarify whether they affect the two key exclusions up till now, the crimes of terrorism and high treason. All spoilers on the outcome for that aspect of the text are, for the moment, withheld. The Spanish prime minister already hinted that agreement was close this afternoon: a definitive agreement with Junts was a matter of "minutes or hours" away, said Pedro Sánchez. And so it was. The Republican Left have also joined the equation, and all three will arrive this Thursday at the Congress of Deputies bearing a new alternative draft.
The three parties claim to have reached an agreement through a single text "based on the various amendments that were kept alive" when the bill was sent for re-negotiation a month ago. The PSOE, ERC and Junts also claim to have concluded an agreement resulting from "joint work" that takes into account "the guidelines of constitutional, European and international law, as well as the preliminary report of the Venice Commission". It is, they say in their statement, legislation that protects "all the people linked to the pro-independence process" and that is "fully in line with the Spanish Constitution, European law and jurisprudence and the best European and international standards".
The transactional amendment (the name given to such an amendment formed by combining elements from different proposals) will be debated and voted on in the justice committee of the Congress of Deputies, starting at eleven in the morning. It will have to be passed by the parliamentary majority that made possible the investiture of Pedro Sánchez as prime minister (PSOE, Sumar, ERC, Junts, the PNB, Bildu and Podemos), which will also have to give the new overall draft bill the green light. Predictably, the text of the law will receive the seal of the Spanish lower house on Thursday, March 14th, in a special plenary session. From here, the amnesty will begin its stormy journey to the Senate, where the opposition People's Party (PP) will retain it for two months, attempting to veto it or empty it of its content. However, whatever the upper house does to the text, the agreement drafted between the independentists and the Spanish government will be recovered went it returns to the legislatively more-powerful lower house, and thus it will be the text passed by the Congress that enters into force. This final step is estimated to be reached at the end of May.
Pedro Sánchez, earlier today: "We are about to reach an accord on a law of transcendental importance for Spanish democracy, which will allow us to leave behind all of the judicial consequences of a territorial and constitutional crisis on a scale that Spanish democracy had not experienced in its 45 years."
The amnesty law had been in the ice-box since the end of January, when Junts refused to give its approval to the wording of the draft law, arguing that it had "holes through which abusive Spanish justice" could pass, turning it "into waste paper". The Junts leader in Congress, Míriam Nogueras argued that "stopping the repression halfway is not stopping it" and asserted that the text, as it was then, meant "a selective and deferred amnesty". The vote against the draft by Carles Puigdemont's party, insisting that the way to strengthen the law was through its own amendments, did not kill the bill, but rather sent it back to the justice committee and thus gave more time to independentists and Socialists to negotiate and bridge the differences (in the beginning they had two weeks, which ended up becoming a whole month).
The amnesty, a deal separate from the budget
This key agreement is not considered to run parallel with the Spanish government budget. That is what the PSOE has stated in recent days. Even the PM himself, Pedro Sánchez, made that clear this Wednesday in an informal conversation with journalists. Having reached this pact with Junts does not imply having already joined hands with the pro-independence parties regarding the also-critical question of the public accounts. There would only be correlation over the two issues in case of disagreement.
In other words, the Sánchez executive was convinced that it was essential to reach an agreement with Junts on the amnesty if they intended to have their budget passed. They had assumed that the Puigdemont party would obstruct the accounts if in the end there was no green light for the legislation to stop the judicial persecution of independentists. If nothing goes wrong, the PSOE will be able to unload some of the stress of this major burden - the amnesty - and turn its attention to budget negotiations.
An agreement that had been hinted at since Monday
The deal between the pro-independence parties and the Socialists comes after a string of messages in the last few days and hours affirming that there was light at the end of the tunnel. Speaking from Brazil, this afternoon Pedro Sánchez took for granted a transactional amendment that would be announced in "a matter of minutes or hours" and showed confidence in the reaching of "a parliamentary agreement with the various parties to push forward a law which will have transcendental importance". The words of the Spanish PM were in line with what was expressed yesterday from the Moncloa palace: they kept the door open to further modifications, but did not specify whether modifications to the crimes of terrorism and treason would be accepted. In front of the cameras, the presidency minister, Félix Bolaños, affirmed this Wednesday morning that they were "in the final stretch" to reach an agreement with Junts and on Tuesday, and in the corridors of Senate, the first deputy PM of the Spanish government, María Jesús Montero, recognized that the pact was "close". Earlier, at party HQ, PSOE spokesperson Esther Peña had excluded any possibility of removing the exclusions of terrorism and treason.
In the pro-independence ranks, Junts has maintained a deafening silence in recent days and has given no clues about the evolution and meaning of the negotiations. For its part, ERC showed its "optimism" this afternoon that the "three-way" negotiations would come to fruition. Teresa Jordà celebrated that the PSOE had opened up "to being able to improve and expand it" by attending to the amendments proposed by the pro-independence parties a month ago, which did not obtain approval then but were kept alive in the draft version and have now, it seems, been reconsidered.