The President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragones, Based on the initiative that he made public in the framework of the general policy debate, he has begun to explain what will be the mechanism through which the Government plans to prepare the Catalan proposal for Clarity Agreement. It is a process in various stages and which also aims to combine different types of legitimacies. In a first phase, the Government will pose a set of questions about the possible ways of resolving the conflict to a group of experts, the Academic Council, from which they elaborated a first report. The second phase will be a social debate in which this report will be presented and submitted to the consideration of the Catalan political parties with parliamentary representation, with the exception of Vox, and entities of the civil society, and that will later be the subject of debate in a participatory process through eight ‘focus groups’, one per veguería, made up of one hundred people chosen by lottery. Finally, based on the results of this deliberation, the Academic Council must prepare a final report that will be transferred to the Government, which is the one who will give the definitive form to the Clarity Agreement proposal that will be presented to the Government of Spain.
This ERC initiative is novel and can allow progress in the resolution of the conflict, however, it must overcome difficulties and avoid falling into the tics that have led us to a dead end. The idea was born without consensus, even in the independence camp where Junts per Catalunya has already expressed its misgivings, so that, in addition to convincing outsiders, it will have to overcome the reluctance of its own, something that is not easy in the electoral context in which we find ourselves and with the judicial front still open. And also part of the same debatable assumption that made the ‘procés’ emerge, that is, the supposed existence of a majority of 80% in favor of the right to decide according to the Government’s own surveys. There is no doubt that the independence movement, and this is perfectly legitimate, considers that the only acceptable solution to the dispute is a referendum. But a government that claims to be democratic cannot continue giving more credibility to the polls than to the polls and therefore cannot ignore the composition of Parliament and that at the moment support for the referendum in the Chamber does not even reach 60%.
Any search for consensus must privilege the Parliament and without exclusions from entry, since it is the representative body and with democratic legitimacy, so that its participation in this initiative must not be placed on an equal footing with that of civil society and the participatory process. . But, above all, what will condition the scope of the initiative is that the Government is capable of ask open-ended questions even with regard to the very definition of the conflict, so as to allow the experts to think outside the box and thus open up new perspectives, even beyond the referendum, that can broaden the consensus and add more sensitivities. If this is not the case, and even if it is after many turns and trying to mobilize many legitimacies, this idea will not cease to be a new alibi to return to the referendum. Again.