The 'commons' shake Yolanda Díaz's campaign by asking to include a referendum for Catalonia in the program: "You must vote"

Now that Yolanda Díaz was focusing all the focuses of her campaign on her proposals to “improve people's lives” and on talking about the problems of mortgages, rents, salaries or the shopping basket, the commons have disturbed that strategic axis by recovering the claim to hold an independence referendum in Catalonia.

This topic has arisen during the presentation of the candidacy of En Comú Podem (the Catalan brand integrated into Sumar) for the general elections, where the head of the list, Aina Vidal, has advocated for the inclusion of the self-determination consultation in the “program electoral” of the coalition for the 23-J.

“In the referendum we are where we have always been. Catalonia must vote on its future. It will form part of our electoral program”, Vidal pointed out when asked by the media, in statements collected by Europa Press, at the presentation ceremony in Sabadell.

This response, which recovers a thorny issue and which has always generated conflict within the space of the alternative left to the PSOE, has caught Sumar off guard, since it was not a hot issue that was on the table right now or that generated a debate internal for inclusion.

Official sources from Sumar assured this newspaper yesterday that the self-determination referendum will not be part of the electoral program of 23-J, but instead it will bet on defending that the Catalans can vote for the agreement that results from the “dialogue table”. between the Government and the Generalitat. By way of “ratification”.

This is right now Sumar's official position for these elections, although the sources consulted add that the commons “defend what they have always defended for Catalonia” and that the referendum has always been a “horizon” for the future in that position.

The consultation in the 2019 and 2021 program

The defense of a consultation by the Catalan confluence is not in itself a novelty. It is the position that this party has been maintaining since the years of the process and that its leader, Ada Colau, has defended on countless occasions as a democratic solution to the lace of Catalonia. Pablo Iglesias then made it his own and formed part of the political position of Podemos, despite the electoral cost and some internal criticism.

Without going any further, this issue was included in the Podemos program for the November 2019 general elections.. Item 281: “Democratic resolution of the Catalan conflict. The viable management of the conflict in Catalonia involves building a reconciliation process that allows for dialogue and reaching agreements. We bet on an agreed referendum in which Podemos will defend a new lace for Catalonia in Spain”.

In February 2021, in the program for the regional elections in Catalonia, the commons maintained the request for an agreed referendum. It was proposed “to agree on a law to establish the procedure, conditions, qualified majorities and the interpretation of any popular consultation by means of a referendum on the modification of the political status of Catalonia and the communities of the State”. In this sense, it was requested to adapt Canada's clarity law: “competence to hold a referendum, respect for democratic and federal principles and for the rule of law, clear rules for interpreting the result of the consultation and obligation, of both governments, to negotiate loyally to carry out the necessary legislative and constitutional changes that allow the popular will to be put into effect”.

Now, in the absence of an electoral program as such from Sumar, which will not see the light of day until next week at the earliest, the platform has 35 documents that structure the main lines of Díaz's country project. One of them refers to the intention of creating a “new territorial model” that would have as its essence the “recognition” of the “national plurality” of Spain and the reconciliation of that condition with “an integrating idea of the nation.”

Throughout that document, the demand for an independence referendum is avoided, as Podemos had assimilated, and it defends going beyond autonomy with a strong commitment to “self-government” and “shared government”.. A “new territorial contract”, it is stressed, that would have a “federal character” and that would allow the “necessary changes to facilitate a harmonious fit of the legitimate claims around the reform processes of the autonomous statutes” to be articulated at different rates.