Sánchez and Aragonès resume the dialogue without clarifying the scope of the "dejudicialization"

Three months after being on the verge of breaking off relations, Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès held their first meeting this Friday in La Moncloa in almost a year, which has served to put relations between the Government and the Generalitat back on track after the crisis over the

The first concrete result is that both Administrations return to the dialogue table: it will be held at the end of this month in Madrid.

At that appointment, from which the two parties promise tangible results, one arrives with the doubt of how far what they have called "dejudicialization" of the "political conflict" will go.

The Government intends that a formula be found at the table to improve the procedural situation of dozens of pro-independence leaders and former charges with pending cases due to the

, and also demands that the review of the crime of sedition be addressed, without further delay.

Sources from the Generalitat insist that there is ground to move forward on this path and, although Aragonès has made it clear that he does not negotiate on behalf of Carles Puigdemont, this change in the Penal Code could affect the

who fled to Belgium in 2017 to elude Spanish justice.

The government sources consulted reject the possibility that this issue will be dealt with at the table within two weeks;

They admit that Pedro Sánchez is in favor of reforming the Criminal Code in this type of crime to "modernize" it, but they believe that at this time there is not a sufficient parliamentary majority to carry out a legal change.

The meeting of the dialogue table will be the third since Sánchez and Quim Torra, Aragonès's predecessor in the Government, chaired the constitutive meeting on February 26, 2020 in La Moncloa.

The next one took place on September 15 in Barcelona.

The great unknown remains what will be the scope of the agreements reached at this new meeting of the dialogue table, in which the presidents will not be present.

The political message highlighted by sources from the Executive is that this Friday's meeting is the verification that "absolute normality" has been resumed in relations.

The proof would be that ERC facilitated all the votes this week in Congress, including its abstention on the Memory Law.

According to all parties, this Friday's meeting was "cordial" and "kind" after a crisis that, according to several ministers, "there was a moment when it seemed that the Government was being carried away".

The ability to redirect the crisis – although the Republicans suspect that the Government wants to take advantage of the summer to solve the meeting without the media expectation that it would have at another time of the year – coincides with a new judicial setback for the independence movement: the decision of the attorney general of the EU to agree with Spain against Belgium, opening the door to the surrender of Puigdemont, the

He has fled from Spanish justice since 2017. This issue has not been addressed at the meeting, according to the minister spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, and voices from the Government insist that there is nothing concrete in this regard.

“The Government respects the administrations of justice, European and whatever it may be”, said the socialist.

The reform of the crime of sedition has not come up at the meeting either, they underline in the Government.

Aragonès has said that he does not want to anticipate any agreement that the table may reach but he is confident that there will be and also in the line of "dejudicialization".

Within the ERC, it is believed that the Supreme Court made an excessively broad interpretation of sedition, allowing for what they consider to be indeterminate legal concepts.

The sentence condemning the leaders of the

speaks, for example, of "a kind of

, they say.

Republicans defend total amnesty and advocate the repeal of a crime that they see as anachronistic, but they do not intend to let the window of opportunity to modify the criminal type pass.

This is where, for example, Puigdemont could benefit: if the years of sentence were greatly reduced, he could avoid preventive detention in the case of returning to Spain.

The Government is much more cautious about the possibility of reforming the Penal Code to review the crime of sedition.

Sánchez assured in an interview in La Vanguardia at the end of June: “We have always defended updating the Penal Code.

We have to modernize it and adapt some precepts to the democracies around us”.

But then the president stressed that, being an organic law, it required an absolute majority in Congress (176 seats).

"It seems to me that today we do not have the majority to address that change," he settled.

Dejudicialization, despite the reservations of the Government, which does not finish specifying it, is very present on the agenda with the Generalitat.

The Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, and the Catalan Minister of the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà, agreed last week on a "methodological agreement to strengthen the negotiation process" that was ratified this Friday.

In the two-page document, entitled

, the two Executives agree "to contribute to the end of the judicialization of the political conflict, guaranteeing legal certainty", and resume the dialogue table with at least two meetings Before the end of the year.

The relationship with Together

The successive approach and distancing of the Government and the ERC has been permanent in these months and has generated more than one scare in important votes such as that of the labor reform, which the Republicans rejected and went ahead due to the mistake of a PP deputy.

The most serious crisis occurred in April, after learning of the report by the Canadian organization Citizen Lab on the espionage of 65 people from the pro-independence sphere with the Israeli program Pegasus.

As a result of this scandal, the secret services of the CNI ―which had been singled out and denied any relationship with that case― explained that in 2019 the mobile phones of 17 pro-independence leaders had been intervened, including that of Aragonès himself, but that they had done so with judicial authorization, during the investigation for the strong disturbances after the sentence of the

.

The meeting between Sánchez and Aragonès was precisely proposed for April, but was canceled as a result of these events.

Sánchez has influenced the meeting with Aragonès in that Junts, who rejects the table, attend the meeting at the end of the month, since it is part of the coalition that governs Catalonia.

“We would like the table to be held in July, and of course we would like to have the presence of Junts per Catalunya”, Sánchez already expressed two weeks ago in an interview in EL PAÍS.

"For the dialogue to be positive, we all have to be represented at the table, that both governments are represented as a whole," Rodríguez asserted.

Aragonès, however, insists that the delegations have to be at the level of members of the Executive and not of parties.

“This is not a party conflict.

It is the governments that have this legitimacy to reach agreements”, the Republican leader has riveted, thus closing the door, once again,

The Government has also requested that, just as the table with the Generalitat is resumed, a table be held between the Catalan parties, as the PSC demands without Aragonès attending to their demands.

Asked if this meeting already implied a return to normal relations between the Government and the Generalitat, Aragonès assured that "normalization occurs if there are specific agreements".

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