Pedro Sánchez needs Junts per Catalunya’s support in order to be invested again as Spanish prime minister. The results of the July 23rd general election gave the PSOE no room for manoeuvre except for reaching an agreement with Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), Basque Country Unite (Bildu), the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Junts to repeat their stay in Moncloa palace, and hypotheses have already been put forward as to how an agreement could be reached with Carles Puigdemont’s party. On Tuesday, José Manuel García-Margallo, former People’s Party (PP) foreign minister, detailed a possible formula for reaching an agreement between Junts and the PSOE. “Sánchez could propose a plan B: legal recognition of the Basque and Catalan nations, thoroughness of the autonomous laws and an arbitration procedure to resolve conflicts,” he declared on Catalonia’s public television channel TV3.
It would no longer be a question of proposing a referendum. It would no longer be a question of proposing a referendum on self-determination, but rather a modification of the Basque and Catalan statutes that would recognise the Basque and Catalan legal nation, that would give the autonomous laws the possibility of excluding any action by the central administration, that is to say that they would be exhaustive, and would deny the Spanish Constitutional Court’s capacity of intervening to resolve inter-territorial conflicts, which would be replaced by an arbitration procedure”, explained García-Margallo.
