The independence parties are stuck and do not agree on a date for the dialogue table with the Government

The Catalan Government partners, Junts per Catalunya and ERC, still do not agree on when and how to set up the dialogue table with the central government, despite both expressing their desire to be “as soon as possible”. The difference on how both formations address this forum was again evident yesterday, after a meal called by President Quim Torra ended without a date proposal, as the Republicans demanded. The negotiations continue and Junts insists on claiming a rapporteur.

The meeting in Barcelona, ​​two weeks ago, between the presidents of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and that of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, ended with the will of both parties to launch the dialogue table during this month of February. The president then said that, first, he would summon again the independence parties (including the CUP), the ANC and Òmnium to unify positions and then specify the details of the forum with the Government.

"The president has explained his meeting with Sánchez, as he had promised," explains a source close to the negotiations. Officially, neither the Government nor any of the participating formations wanted to comment on the meeting, which Torra convened with discretion in the Casa dels Canonges, a building annexed to the Palau de la Generalitat. The meeting did not even leave a proposed date for the first meeting of the dialogue forum, which must be agreed according to the La Moncloa agenda. "We haven't reached that point yet," adds the same source.

Just before yesterday's appointment with Quim Torra, Esquerra advocated in his weekly press conference that the deadlines announced by Sánchez and the Catalan president were met and the first meeting was called before the end of February. “Let's stop talking about the negotiating table and talk at the negotiating table,” asked Marta Vilalta, the ERC spokeswoman, after the meeting of the Republican Executive.

Torra's position on the table has been ambiguous. Since the initial misgivings when the pact between PSOE and ERC was known (in exchange for the abstention in the investiture of Pedro Sánchez), the president has gone on to try to establish himself as the main interlocutor and demand additional conditions, with the idea of ​​demonstrating that he is Who controls the times. This is the case of the controversial presence of a rapporteur. It is a figure that Sanchez already discarded and that Torra, curiously, did not defend before the media the day of the visit of the head of the Government to Barcelona.

Yesterday was the second meeting of the table of parties and independent entities, which Torra also raised in order to seek the unit of secessionist action on the forum for negotiation with the State. The first, a month ago, did not end well at all. He certified the disagreement regarding the rapporteur - he does not veto it and in fact supported his existence in the Parliament but neither does he believe it should be an impediment - but it served to ratify something that was already known beforehand: the defense of the amnesty of the politicians in prison and the need for the independence referendum as a Catalan proposal to take to the forum for dialogue with the Government.

Esquerra wanted to make his position very clear yesterday and warned that "there are no excuses" so that the table - which Sanchez and Torra will preside at least at their first meeting - is not held at the latest next week. Vilalta charged veiledly against his partners from the Government for slowing down the dialogue He assured that the PSOE would like the negotiating table "not to exist and not have to convene it. Another thing he would like is for us to boycott ourselves [the representation of the Government], but ERC will not give him this gift "Those who have the responsibility, who set the date," said Vilalta.

In La Moncloa they are waiting for the Government to reach an internal agreement and propose a date. Theoretically with only two weeks of margin the availability of Pedro Sánchez is shortened, especially by the president's agenda in Europe.

Vilalta also requested that the content of the political negotiation table on Catalonia and the scope of the State-Generalitat bilateral commission, contemplated in the Statute, where the transfer of competencies or improvements in regional financing be discussed, be mixed. Despite this warning, the Republican leader did make the bilateral appointment subject to the first launch of the dialogue table. “It was a commitment to facilitate the investiture. In addition, it will allow us to know if the Sánchez Government really has a willingness to dialogue, ”he said. ERC and Junts already clashed two weeks ago over the difference in criteria on when to call the most institutional meeting.