The legislature has only just begun and the attitude of Junts per Catalunya is already testing the patience among the members of the investiture majority that supports the Government. After placing the Executive on the brink of the precipice last week, in the vote on the decrees with anti-crisis measures and reforms demanded by Brussels, the independence party once again disconcerted the rest of the parties with the presentation, last Tuesday, of the amendments to the proposed amnesty law, in extremis and without any explanation. When all the other groups involved in the initiative assumed that these amendments would be processed jointly, Junts stepped forward with its own initiatives and ended up dragging Esquerra Republicana (ERC) down the same path.
Among the groups that support the Government there is a unanimous impression: one of the greatest difficulties in moving forward with the legislature will lie in the competition between Junts and ERC. Carles Puigdemont’s party is often unpredictable even for those accustomed to dealing with him. And he has also put all his effort into demonstrating that he is a much firmer and more effective negotiator than his Republican rival in the Catalan independence camp was in the previous four years. The fear of the entire bloc that supported Pedro Sánchez’s investiture is that these attitudes will become even more acute as the regional elections in Catalonia approach, where the current legislature ends at the beginning of 2025.
What happened this Tuesday with the amendments to the amnesty law has only increased this concern. Among all the groups that support the initiative there was an unwritten pact not to present any individual amendment and to promote only some technical adjustments in a text that, according to its promoters, is already very measured in the face of the certainty that it will be examined with a microscopic magnifying glass when the grace measures are brought before the courts. ERC had been ensuring for weeks that it would not present any amendment that was not agreed upon with the other parties. The two Basque nationalist groups and the Galician BNG would limit themselves to assenting to what was decided by their Catalan co-religionists.
That was the scenario described by those involved on Tuesday at noon, just a few hours before the deadline to present the amendments ended at 6:00 p.m. Both socialist sources and sources from ERC and the Basque groups indicated that the details were being finalized between the legal teams of each party and that the negotiations were of a purely technical nature, without political content. And so it happened: PSOE, Sumar, ERC, EH Bildu and BNG jointly signed nine proposals with minor tweaks.
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The amendments by ERC and Junts, although with different nuances, aim to make the pardons for independence supporters with pending legal cases applicable even to those who have final convictions for terrorism, an assumption excluded from the initial text of the future law. But ERC and Junts seem to differ on how this situation should be specified in the regulation, so that it overcomes subsequent filters and legal resources and this divergence or “spike” between the Catalan independence parties could be, according to sources from that commission, the reason for the uncheck in the signing of the amendments of Puigdemont’s party. The independence supporters justify this demand in what they understand as animosity against the independence movement of judges such as Manuel García Castellón, of the National Court. This magistrate has attributed terrorism crimes to Carles Puigdemont and the general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira, both fleeing abroad, holding them responsible for the death of a French tourist due to a heart attack, on October 14, 2019, at the Barcelona airport. , which was surrounded by activists who were protesting against the judicial sentences of leaders of the process.
The episode of the amendments has confirmed the other groups in an impression that is unanimous: Junts “is going to make it very difficult” to advance in the legislature. And in a month the negotiations on the Budgets will begin.
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