"Within the Constitution and the Statute we can talk about anything. Outside, nothing." That was the response of the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, to the still-unreleased list of 21 demands that the president of Catalonia, Quim Torra, handed him at the meeting they held in Barcelona last Thursday. With regard to this, Sánchez declared that everything that is "outside" is nothing more than "a monologue by the Catalan government" - striking a different tone to that of the joint statement made with the Catalan government a week before.
Sánchez, who gave a summing up of his seven months in government at the press conference following his last cabinet meeting for the year, has repeatedly said in the past that the solution to the crisis in Catalonia requires loyalty and that this means finding a solution in the framework of the Spanish Constitution and Catalonia's Statute of Autonomy.
The Spanish prime minister said today that the basis of the agreement between the Barcelona and Madrid governments had already been transmitted in the joint statement after the meeting on 20th December at Barcelona's Pedralbes palace. "The statement said that it was necessary to commit to the law and dialogue and to work for broad, transversal agreements," he said.
However, the statement of 20th December, did not specifically mention the constitution or the Catalan statute at all, but rather spoke of negotiating "within the framework of legal certainty". Catalan minister for the presidency Elsa Artadi, present at the meeting, told El Nacional afterwards that this wording did not exclude elements and solutions currently beyond the scope of the constitution "because laws are adapted to political decisions". Artadi said that, historically, "whenever there has been a political decision that was not in the legal framework - giving the vote to women, for example - the legal framework was adapted and that gave it legal certainty."
Nevertheless, the Spanish prime minister has now returned to a situation where he specifically uses the Spanish constitution as his shield, while also asking the Catalan agreement to "move from the desire for dialogue to real dialogue". Sánchez assured that his executive is working to create spaces for dialogue and bilateral cooperation "which can bring back loyalty and trust to tackle a political solution."