What can Pedro Sánchez offer Carles Puigdemont? The question is already seven days old but all the signs suggest that it will take quite a few more weeks until the line to be taken by the Spanish Socialist (PSOE) leader, in his bid to reach an agreement with Together for Catalonia (Junts) and thus continue as head of the Spanish government, begins to be drawn. With the immediate future of Spanish politics in the hands of the Catalan president-in-exile, ElNacional.cat has contacted several experts to sketch out what Spain might possibly offer Catalonia without either of the two sides immediately throwing up their arms in dispair.
The starting point is well known. The arithmetic resulting from the July 23rd general election means that Pedro Sánchez could be voted by MPs as leader of a new Spanish government if he is able to reach agreements with a series of parties, but the political force that seems likely to make things most complicated for him is Junts, which is asking for an amnesty for all those investigated due to the Catalan independence process and a referendum on Catalan self-determination. The first response of Sánchez’s acting executive has been the expected one: negotiations must take place within the framework of the Spanish Constitution and neither of the two things demanded by Puigdemont’s party have a place there. But this is, for the moment, the starting position for both sides. There are voices who point out that the sacred text of the Spanish constitutionalists can be interpreted in different ways. One of those voices is Joaquín Urías, who notes that the word ‘amnesty’ does not appear in the Constitution but the text does spell out that “general pardons” are prohibited, and this section of the text causes a diversity of opinions among experts.
