The explanatory statement of the future amnesty law confronts the independence movement

The explanatory statement of the future amnesty law, which is part of the investiture agreement of Pedro Sánchez, not only pits the PSOE against the representatives of JxCAT and former president Carles Puigdemont. Above all, it divides the independence movement, which has plunged into a bitter fight between the different sectors to determine the story of what the 1-O vote entailed.. These differences have always been latent, but now they have come to light in the most bitter way..

For the doctor in History, Agustí Colomines, very close to JxCAT, the situation is as follows. “We start from something that we do not understand: we lost. Let's see if we can get it into our heads. We do not live in an independent Catalan republic. We lost and we are trying to regain the initiative. History, luckily for us, has not abandoned us and we still have the capacity to fight,” he noted in an interview with Vilaweb, which has raised many blisters.. Especially since the sectors opposed to the amnesty within the independence movement defend the opposite: that October 1 was the great victory of the movement over Spain, which represents a democratic mandate that sovereignty cannot and should not ignore..

If the explanatory statement of the new law reflects the vision of Supreme Court judge Manuel Marchena, the independence movement will read it as a defeat. From JxCAT to Waterloo they are very concerned about the construction of a “political story” in which the amnesty represents a victory for sovereignty. In fact, something similar happened with the pardons. The nationalist world tried very hard to build a narrative of victory and the Government of Spain did nothing. But as the months passed, the pardons ended up being experienced as a political defeat.

These statements in the laws do not have a normative nature.. This also implies that it cannot be appealed before the Constitutional Court (TC).. But it is considered key to validating its constitutionality. “It is not about making the amnesty that each of us likes, it is about passing the filter of the Constitutional Court, because if we all look very good, but it does not pass the filter it will be of no use to all the retaliated people, starting with the exiles,” said lawyer Jaume Asens on TV3 last week. Asens has been commissioned by Vice President Yolanda Díaz to negotiate the rule by Sumar and today in Barcelona they will present the recommendations of the legal experts who have been advising them, although the document they present will not be the law itself nor will it respond to the project. what is being negotiated.

Asens thus sent a message to the independence movement. There must be an exposition of reasons yes or yes. This introduction only has a hermeneutic or interpretive legal value, but it also establishes the political narrative that supports it, according to an ERC source.. In fact, it is common in amnesty situations. It is so relevant that in 1977 the fathers of the Transition preferred to dispense with the exposition of reasons because they could not agree on describing what the Franco regime had entailed..

Background crisis

The underlying crisis responds to all that independence movement that is against the amnesty, the leadership of the ANC and a good part of its bases, the members of the Council of the Republic who have forced a vote to try to block the investiture against the interests of Carles Puigdemont or the personalities with whom radical sectors identify, whether they are the MEP Clara Ponsatí or the former vice president of the Parliament, Josep Costa.

Costa has precisely been one of those who has reacted the most angrily. “Most of his party can assume that story of defeat (even if it is blaming ERC), but he does not. “President Puigdemont cannot tell his followers that we must accept the amnesty because we have lost!” he replied on X, formerly Twitter, in a bitter discussion with Colomines..

These debates can seem very esoteric when there is half of Spain that does not accept the amnesty due to the way in which it is being processed and what it means in essence.. But on another scale, the same thing is happening within the independence movement, with consequences now unimaginable for Puigdemont and for many of the senior officials of JxCAT, for example, Laura Borràs, who has always placed 1-O as the core center of his political action.

Defend amnesty

In the JxCAT environment, aware of these differences, they are trying to sell the amnesty as a way to settle a moral debt with all those bases of the independence movement who saw how the leaders of the process were pardoned, while they continue to this day carrying with multiple legal problems. This goes for the young people of the so-called “battle for Urquinaona,” the thousands of people who took over the Barcelona airport and who were then abandoned to their fate by Tsunami Democràtic in 2019, and the most diverse activists. But that doesn't convince many..

The depth of the dilemma is such that the newspaper Ara, the reference of the most focused independence movement, published an editorial on October 2 in which it stated: “Today everyone admits that the referendum was a massive mobilization, but that precisely because of the lack of internal recognition (half of the Catalan population did not participate) and external recognition (neither the State nor the international community granted it validity) could never have legal effects. One of the basic principles of referendums is that they must be accepted by both sides, by those of yes and by those of no, and unfortunately that did not happen in the Catalan case.. If 2.3 million people participated in 1-O, a few months later, on 21-D, in elections imposed by Madrid, but accepted by everyone, four and a half million did so.. Something like this was necessary to open the way to the amnesty: the political mandate of October 1 does not exist.