The Government resumes this Friday the meetings with the Generalitat

The Minister of the Presidency Félix Bolaños and the 'consellera' of the Presidency of the Generalitat, Laura Vilagrà, greet each other at the Ministry of the Presidency in La Moncloa in Madrid on June 22. Andrea Comas

There is already a date for the next meeting of political significance between the Government and the Generalitat.

It will be this Friday, the 8th, and it will be held at the Palau de la Generalitat in Barcelona by the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, and the Minister of the Presidency of the Generalitat, Laura Vilagrà.

According to sources from the Catalan Executive, the meeting seeks to prepare the meeting between Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès, to which the head of the Government promised last May.

Aragonès himself announced last April, after learning of the espionage case, that he was freezing "political relations" with the central Executive until explanations were given about who commissioned the espionage, why, and responsibilities were clarified.

Although ERC is not satisfied with how progress has been made on these issues, Bolaños and Vilagrà keep the line open to try to channel relations.

To make matters worse, the news about the low investment in Catalonia from the Ministry of Economy itself ended up giving the Government more arguments about the crisis of credibility towards Sánchez.

The minister and the counselor have already met twice.

The first in April and the second, on June 22 in La Moncloa.

In that last meeting, the commitment of the meeting between Sánchez and Aragonès came out to finally address not only the issue of Pegasus but also the breaches in investments.

It is a meeting that the Generalitat puts as the first step in order to get relations out of the freezer.

If it doesn't happen, they say, there won't be the necessary trust to continue negotiating other issues.

At that meeting in La Moncla it was also agreed to work "on the methodology of the dialogue table", whose only appointment is about to celebrate its first anniversary.

ERC reproaches the Government for not meeting the dialogue table in ten months, despite the fact that the intention was to have done so at the beginning of the year.

A calendar that was truncated, justify government sources, due to the sixth wave of covid caused by the omicron variant in January and the new international, economic and social context due to the war in Ukraine.

After that last meeting, Bolaños pointed out that the objective of the meeting was "the uncompromising defense of dialogue, negotiation (...) to deal with and resolve differences" and the search for "political solutions and agreements", and framed the conversation with Vilagrá in a new horizon of “institutional and political stability that looks to the future”.

In the Generalitat they see very tight that in the remainder of the month, before the holidays, both the meeting of the presidents and a new meeting of the dialogue table can be accommodated.

“We would like it to be in the month of July, and of course we would like to have the presence of Junts per Catalunya”, Sánchez had stated about a future meeting of the table in his last interview in EL PAÍS.

The Government had already ruled out a meeting of the Generalitat State Bilateral Commission, a meeting that technically should be held before the holidays, because "there were no important transfers on the table", argued Vilagrà herself on June 16.

The meeting with the Generalitat is also part of the previous contacts of the Executive with a key partner for La Moncloa such as ERC -the party to which Aragonès belongs- just four days before another fundamental milestone for the Government: the debate on the state of the nation to be held from July 12 to 14 in Congress.

This Wednesday, after almost three months of work, the legal services of the Generalitat have filed a complaint on behalf of Aragonès for espionage.