PSOE and Junts will hold their first meeting in Geneva on Saturday

The PSOE has postponed its first meeting with JxCAT to this Saturday, December 2, to fulfill the investiture pacts that allowed Pedro Sánchez to renew his mandate, as confirmed by sources familiar with the contacts between the two parties.. The meeting had to be held in November, but both the socialists and the independence party already recognized that the planned calendar, which specified that the first meeting was going to be in November, was going to be missed.. This first contact between the two parties will be in Geneva (Switzerland), to maintain the context agreed with those of Carles Puigdemont, which gave an international dimension to these conversations..

The Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, acknowledged this Tuesday that the meeting would no longer take place in November, although JxCAT had been dragging its feet on the matter for days.. The meeting is expected to have a discreet format and not even the international verifier will be made public, as El Confidencial reported.. A photo of this first meeting is not planned either and it is not known who will take part in each match, although Junts always floated the idea that Puigdemont was going to attend..

The agenda of the meeting is unknown. But the date of December 2nd indicates that JxCAT is aiming for its meeting to be before the one held by Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès to reactivate the Government-Generalitat dialogue table for this legislature. The independence movement now lives on these small details.

JxCAT has been quick to clarify that the climate with the PSOE is good and that the legislature is not in danger at all. An example is given that the parliamentary group, headed by Míriam Nogueras, will chair some commissions in Congress, something that is being negotiated at this time.. But that is part of parliamentary routine.

That is, neither PSOE nor JxCAT want to send an image of deterioration in their relationship in the first steps of the legislature.. Less complicated for the socialists, who have already swallowed the toad of negotiating with Puigdemont, and more complicated for the Junts sovereigntists, who had placed emphasis on small details, such as the fact that the meeting was going to be in November, to make it more acceptable. to their voters the costs of the pact.

Among these costs, it stands out that what Pedro Sánchez stated at the beginning of the negotiation has been fulfilled: investiture through amnesty. The independence movement always assured that it would also achieve many other things, but in practice JxCAT has only achieved one dialogue table, which it calls the negotiation table and which is between parties..

Puigdemont's right-hand man, MEP Toni Comín, assured SER that the real political negotiation on the future of Catalonia will take place at the table that Junts and the PSOE have agreed upon and not at that of the Government with the Generalitat..

Avoid controversies

The Generalitat chose this Tuesday to avoid controversies with Comín and the Waterloo environment. The Generalitat refuses to turn the negotiation with the Government into a competition with JxCAT and in this sense has downplayed the importance of the PSOE meeting with Junts in Geneva before Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès do. “This is not a race, the order is not important”, replied the spokeswoman for the Government, Patrícia Plaja, in the press conference after the Executive Council.

Plaja acknowledged doubts about the will of the Sánchez Government to comply with the agreements. “Little trust, ability to enforce agreements completely. If the agreements do not advance, the legislature will not advance, just as the president said,” he warned.. But the reality is that neither JxCAT nor the PSOE can let the Government fall because then they would lose the jackpot of what was negotiated: the amnesty for the independence movement..

Bilateral commissions

Plaja acknowledges that work is being done to set an agenda for this meeting between the presidents of Catalonia and Spain, but there is no set calendar because, among other things, the international agenda of both senior officials is intense at the moment.. Without going any further, Aragonès is currently on an official trip to Korea.

“Everything has to be done, there is still no calendar. But we have got our act together. Everything that this Government had to do is being done,” declared Patrícia Plaja, who denied any partisan interest, as MEP Toni Comín has accused.. The only objective is to achieve “the best results for citizens.”.

The Generalitat has approved updating its representatives in the various tables of the bilateral commissions with the State to materialize some of the investiture agreements that have been reached with the new Executive. The objective is to prepare for the “new political stage” to which Pere Aragonès referred last week. Thus, the Government puts three councilors in charge of negotiating the additions to the amnesty: Laura Vilagrà (Presidency), Natalia Mas (Economy) and Ester Capella (Territori).