Government and Generalitat will meet the dialogue table the last week of July

Once relations between the Government and the ERC have been restored after the espionage scandal, Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès have agreed to meet at the dialogue table in the last week of July. The presidents have met at the Palacio de la Moncloa for about an hour and 45 minutes. The presidents will now delegate the dialogue table to the teams and in Moncloa they insist on the need for Junts to also participate, at a very tense moment in relations between the partners of the Government. The intention of both parties is that the meeting in the last week of the month will result in concrete agreements on the issues in which progress has been made, but they maintain a great distance as far as the solution of the territorial conflict is concerned.

Government and Generalitat had always said that the dialogue table would meet when there were agreements to ratify. “There are many issues that are being worked on between the Generalitat and the Government. There is preliminary work, we are going to determine the work agenda, you can imagine that we have advanced issues and therefore the opportunity to specify and advance them”, the spokeswoman, Isabel Rodríguez, has responded in a generic way, who has slipped that there will be meeting points in that appointment, although he has refused to give clues about the issues on which there is rapprochement. However, she has denied that three key issues for the parties have been addressed: the reform of the crime of sedition that ERC wants to promote, but that the Government cools since it says that there is not a sufficient majority; nor the General State Budgets that will begin to be processed in September; nor of the support that the EU lawyer has given to Spain regarding the extradition of Carles Puigdemont. In any case, the socialist has assured that they respect all judicial decisions.

First agreements

In his appearance after the meeting, Aragonès took it for granted that at the next meeting of the table “the dejudicialization of the conflict” will be addressed and “the first partial agreements to put an end to the repression” will be reached, he said. On these possible agreements, the head of the Government has not wanted to advance, since he has stated that although the work is advanced, they still have to be finalized at the table.

“Ending criminalization and repression is essential to move forward,” said Aragonès, who nevertheless assured that agreements in the area of ​​dejudicialization are the priorities but not the main ones. “We must not deceive anyone: addressing dejudicialization is very important, but as long as the citizens of Catalonia cannot decide their political future in freedom, we are far from resolving the political conflict,” he said.

Despite the harmony that both parties have shown and the intention to close agreements at the end of July, the spokeswoman has recognized that the positions remain very distant with respect to the solution of the substantive conflict. “Regarding the independence cause, they know what the Government’s position is, we must not ignore (…) that we are in very different positions, with enormous differences and the Government’s position continues to be the defense of the Constitution and its Title VIII , but we are clear that the only way to get closer and move forward is through dialogue”.

Will Junts participate?

Government and Generalitat will now have to designate the delegations that attend the meeting of the dialogue table. Already at the meeting last September, Junts was absent, forcing the Sánchez Executive to cut its members. “For the dialogue to be positive, we must all be represented. Whoever decides not to participate will have to explain himself to the Catalans”, Rodríguez replied. “I have informed my government partners of the call for this table and my will is that it participates and has the support of the more political spaces, the better”, Aragonès said after his appointment with Sánchez.

The meeting has been long in coming, but during this time the teams had maintained contact, despite the breakup due to espionage, which led Aragonès to ask Sánchez for this meeting when they coincided in an act in Barcelona in May so that give him face-to-face explanations. His phone was one of those intercepted by the CNI. Since then, the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, and the Minister of the area, Laura Vilagrà, have held a total of three meetings, two in Barcelona and one in Madrid. The first was the most tense. The Government offered the Generalitat an investigation of what happened through the Ombudsman, the entry of the independence forces in the official secrets commission of Congress, where the then director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, gave explanations, and an internal investigation in the center of the spies, in addition to a change in the law that regulates it and an update of the law of official secrets.

Commitment to collaborate in espionage investigations

Aragonès has assured that the steps taken by the Government are insufficient, but he has also remarked that Sánchez has transferred his commitment to collaborate with the judicial investigations. In this sense, the president has recalled that two weeks ago he presented his complaint that he, he has assured, will allow him to claim judicial proceedings.

Setting a first date for the dialogue table was one of the maximum objectives of the Government, which came to the meeting with the desire to offer Sánchez the maximum collaboration in exchange for a calendar for the negotiation and concrete advances in the table. In the last agreed document, on Friday of last week, there was already a commitment to hold two meetings in the remainder of the year. The last time the dialogue table met was in September in Barcelona.

The priority of those from Aragonès is to agree with the Government on legislative reforms to alleviate some of the legal cases in which both independence leaders and activists are immersed. Among others, ERC pursues the reform of the Loreg to avoid cases of supervening ineligibility or also that politicians who have not enriched themselves or third parties can be accused of embezzlement.