Jaume Asens, Sumar's negotiator, "is in contact" with Carles Puigdemont: dejudicialization and language as assets

Few suspected the day that Jaume Asens decided to leave the political front line, and not appear on Sumar's electoral lists as headliner in Barcelona, that he was going to become one of the protagonists of the days after 23-J with his role of achiever to attract the vote of Junts to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. Just a month before the electoral appointment, the former leader of United We Can in the Congress of Deputies had chosen to step aside and not be the main face of En Comú Podem, a reference in Catalonia for the political platform created by Yolanda Diaz. Simply, symbolically, he closed the list as the penultimate candidate between the acting Minister of Universities, Joan Subirats, and the former mayoress of Barcelona Ada Colau.

The parliamentary arithmetic that emerged from the polls, however, has returned to the front those who were one of the founding souls of the commons, precisely with Subirats and Colau after 15-M. Not even 24 hours had passed when Sumar's spokesman, Ernest Urtasun, announced that the left-wing coalition had entrusted Asens with dialogue with the Catalan independence parties, especially with the formation led from Belgium by Carles Puigdemont, with whom “he is in contact », according to sources close to the negotiation.

Given the difficulty of articulating a voting proposal in Catalonia that fulfills the aspirations of secessionism, which for now does not accept that the consultation to ratify an agreement of the dialogue table between the Government and the Generalitat that Sumar proposes does not include the option of independence, the Asens negotiation advances through other areas, with the commitment to address this point during the legislature. Percussion in the dejudicialization to resemble its results to an amnesty, a path in which he has always been involved, and a new impulse to the co-official languages by the State, as Díaz herself recognized yesterday on TVE.

The choice of Asens as interlocutor is not free, since he is an unequivocal defender of the most sovereign postulates within his political space and, above all, he is well connected to the command bridge of Waterloo, the Belgian town where Puigdemont has lived since he fled from justice. A lawyer by profession, specialized in cases that affect alternative social movements, his credentials have a prominent role in two episodes of the most recent Spanish politics, even though it seems like an eternity has passed.. Asens was one of the key figures who advised the former president and several of his advisors in their flight after the hectic Catalan October of 2017, with the 1-O referendum and the subsequent unilateral declaration of independence in Parliament.. A personal friend of former Minister Toni Comín, both began to draw up the strategy to not be accountable to the Spanish Justice after the speech that King Felipe VI gave on October 3, in which he warned that the rule of law should act against those who had subverted the constitutional order in Catalonia.

With churches in Lledoners

The other chapter in which he already put into practice his skills as a mediator with the independence movement was in 2018, when he was deputy mayor of Colau. It was he who opened the doors of the Lledoners prison (Barcelona) to the then general secretary of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, to negotiate with the president of Esquerra, Oriol Junqueras, and Jordi Sànchez (who held the general secretary of JxCat), both in provisional prison, the support of secessionism for the General State Budgets, even when the purple formation had no government responsibility in the first Executive chaired by Sánchez after winning the motion of no confidence against Mariano Rajoy. Those negotiations failed and led to the electoral advance of April 2019, but those contacts laid the foundations for the abstention of the Republicans that allowed the inauguration of January 2020.

Amnesty and referendum

Five years later, the company that Sumar's negotiator is facing seems even more complex.. Sources close to the contacts that Asens leads indicate that the starting point is to normalize that Junts naturally raises its maximum proposals. It is about recognizing “the legitimacy” of their aspirations, an attitude different from that maintained by the PSOE, which from the outset raises the dialogue only in terms that do not go beyond the Constitution. “Self-determination and amnesty are on the table because Junts has put them,” acknowledged last week Jéssica Albiach, leader of the commons in Parliament. From there, negotiation and negotiation and not getting up from the table until the last second of the post-election calendar expires.

In Sumar they recognize that the results of 23-J leave the 14 pro-independence deputies (seven from ERC and seven from JxCat) in a very clear position of strength, with the key to the investiture in their hands, but the numbers are also different if viewed from a concave or convex mirror. The PSC achieved 250,000 more votes than the sum of ERC, Junts and the CUP, which was left without representation in Congress. Moreover, the union of the socialist vote and Sumar in Catalonia doubled the support obtained by republicans and post-convergents. Consequently, taking into account the strength of each block, the maximalism of the cover letter cannot be immovable, argue the commoners. In addition, Asens tries to convince Junts that the only alternative scenario, which is electoral repetition, carries the implicit risk of falling into “involution” both in social rights and in “the resolution of the Catalan conflict.”

That the investiture of Sánchez could depend on the votes of JxCat was something that had already been on the table for months both in Madrid and in Barcelona. Or, in other words, both in the capital of Spain and in Belgium. The hypothesis that the 23-J did not give a wide victory to the PP and that even with the votes of Vox it did not add an absolute majority or touched it, it opened the possibility that the current acting president would resist in La Moncloa. And that only happened to have the support or abstention of the post-convergent deputies, inhibited in almost all negotiations during the last legislature, but who now focus all eyes.