After spending the entire campaign warning Pedro Sánchez that “the price” of his investiture will rise if he is in a position to revalidate the presidency of the Government, ERC has established what would be the requirements that it would impose on the socialist candidate to support him.

There are three demands that the Republicans would pose to Sánchez: to delve into the negotiation on self-determination with the aim of agreeing to hold an independence referendum, to end the “fiscal deficit” – without specifying whether this entails agreeing to a kind of concert to the Basque or an improvement of the autonomic financing system- and the transfer of the Cercanías railway network.

The person in charge of listing the conditions of what has been the preferred partner of the PSOE during the current legislature has been the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, who has acted as Sánchez's main interlocutor to consummate assignments such as the elimination of the crime of sedition or the granting of pardons to secessionist leaders convicted of organizing 1-O.

By specifying the cost of Sánchez's investiture, ERC has distanced itself from the other great Catalan separatist force in the fray, Junts, which categorically refuses to anoint the socialist, as Carles Puigdemont himself confirmed last Sunday.

The neoconvergents accompany their refusal of an ordeal to ERC. On Tuesday they proposed to the Republicans that they agree not to invest any president of Spain until they have committed to transferring to Catalonia the powers to be able to hold an independence referendum autonomously.

The differences between ERC and Junts remain when the electoral campaign is about to end and come to confirm the impossibility of forming a pro-independence “common front” as Aragonès claimed after the secessionist debacle of 28-M. The formations led by Oriol Junqueras and Laura Borràs immediately ruled out coming together in a joint list, in the style of Junts pel Sí.

Nor were they able to capture in their electoral programs any coincidental proposal to set a “lowest common denominator” among all the pro-independence forces.. And it also seems complicated that they will be able to agree on a “unity of action” in Congress once the general elections have been held and the time comes to transfer the separatist strategy to the Cortes.