Little harmony, as the electoral tradition marks, despite the festive music to the beat of castanets and tap dances. This is how the cold meeting at the inauguration of the Barcelona April Fair between the Minister of the Presidency, Felix Bolanosand the ‘president’ of the Generalitat, Pere Aragones, after the shock by the impulse of the clarity agreement by the Government. They greeted each other and little else in the edition of a fair that celebrates half a century and that has been quite a campaign walk.
Without going any further, in addition to the minister and the ‘president, mayors from all parties have paraded through the event, the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, and up to four ‘consellers’ of the Government. Oblivious to the grand inauguration, also the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has been seen by the booths. A display that will be replicated again on Sunday in the epicenter of Barcelona on the occasion of the ‘diada’ of Sant Jordi.
“This is Catalonia that welcomesthat of the different languages and accents”, Bolaños celebrated from the lectern after the lights were turned on. “Catalonia is diversewe would not understand it without the April Fair, a wealth that we have to know how to take care of and accompany”, Aragonès has also intoned. A similar ‘leitmotiv’, that of both, despite the fact that they maintain antagonistic positions on the formula to address the territorial conflict .
The Government maintains that defending a agreed referendum in Catalonia it is sterile because it will not enter into negotiations under any circumstances a proposal that it understands as divisive. President Pedro Sanchez He has entrusted his right hand with a landing in Catalan territory so that, taking advantage of the scenario that will be the ‘diada’ of Sant Jordi to give the starting signal to the race for the municipal elections, make it clear by active and passive that of dialogue, the one that is necessary, but that of referendum, nothing.
In fact, Moncloa’s argumentative framework is that a clarity agreement is extemporaneous because its reading of the situation is that, thanks to the pact strategy woven with ERC, it has “turned page” to the ‘procés’ and the PSC has made its way thanks to the gap between independentistas. If Sánchez strives for one thing every time the Government makes an appearance in Catalonia, it is to exhibit a “standardization” that has been consolidated and that contrasts with the tense years under the governments of the PP. That is why it seeks to remove from the agenda any risk of the territorial conflict resurrecting and once again taking the baton of the political narrative.
A repeated rejection
In the two days that he has been in Catalonia, Bolaños has already used the entire repertoire of disqualifying words at his disposal to discredit the clarity agreement: from “election trap” at the proposal of “confrontation” and “division” between Catalans to “Back to the past” with 1-O as a reference. And Bolaños, who has also made it clear that Aragonès’s plan has no place at the dialogue table now in torpor, still has two more days left to continue delving into a rejection shared by the PSC, which has already threatened to leave the empty chair if the ‘president’ convenes the parties to discuss a vote like the one he proposes.
The Government ignores in its references to the Aragonès plan that it, unlike the 2017 referendum, has the vocation of laying the foundations for a pact that allows the resolution of the territorial conflict and that the theoretical design has been placed in the hands of a ‘sanhedrin’ of academics -some of them non-independence supporters- who have been given carte blanche even to outline alternative proposals to that of a referendum.
Oriol Junqueras: “The Government says things that it does not comply with”
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He has been the president of ERC, oriol junqueras, the person in charge of responding sharply to Minister Bolaños. “The Government says things that it does not comply with,” he blurted out from the booth that the party has at the April Fair. And it is that the Republicans believe that the fact that their votes are key in Congress means that the plan promoted by ‘president’ Aragonès can trade up after the general elections despite the fact that the Socialists insist that they do not even want to hear about him.
With a vocation to bury axes, at least for today, the counselor of the Presidency of Andalusia has intervened, Antonio Sanz Caballero, also invited to the opening of the fair. “Long live the Moreneta and the Virgen del Rocío”, he has dropped in reference to the gag of the TV3 program ‘Està passant’ that sowed controversy two weeks ago and that lit the fuse in the Andalusian campaign. “Andalusians and Catalans are together to advance”, he has settled flanked by the distant climate between the minister and the ‘president’.