In any negotiation you have to tread very finely to discern rhetoric from reality, the tactic of the strategy. Despite the fact that Puigdemont says, actively and passively, that there has been no negotiation to date, but only a prior dialogue, the truth is that The facts prove the opposite. Because although it was just a taster of what is to come, there has of course been a deep and complex negotiation for the constitution of the Table, which allowed for a spectacular progress in the use of Catalan in two institutional areas nothing minor: it will finally become a language of normal use in Congress and the Government has officially asked the European Union to be an official co-official language. In the absence of unanimous approval by the member countries, what is evident is that Junts obtained a tangible revenue, of high symbolic value and enormous political value, which is also his first trophy won in the Madrid arena. The negotiation with Sánchez had a second financial counterpart that we found out curiously (or not) much later: Junts managed to have its own group in Congress thanks to the transfer of two deputies from the PSOE. That is to say, not only has there been a negotiation but also obvious counterparts have been obtained.
The curious thing is that it has been the Junts formation itself that has preferred to silence them and leave them orphans, and has chosen to pretend that there has not even been a negotiation, as if the advance of the Catalan and the formation of their own group had been by spontaneous generation . To understand the reasons for this strange tightrope walking, one must place oneself in the always complex framework of Junts, a party in which its majority current has always officially sold the confrontation as the only method to advance politically and end up achieving independence. The result of the elections, which placed the party at the epicenter of Spanish politics, has also served to show its contradictions: it turns out that the confrontational party has achieved its greatest achievements just the first time it sits down to negotiate. It can be said that Junts and Puigdemont have obtained more political capital in a few days of negotiations than in so many years of proclaiming the confrontation to the four winds. Curiously, the pact has been made with the PSOE and now Puigdemont has achieved the gift of nothing less than meeting with Yolanda Díaz. Hence, Junts has chosen not even to claim the safe official status of Catalan in Congress and probable in Europe, and has preferred to deny the negotiation no matter how obvious it may be. What seems undeniable is that Junts is still unable to escape the tension generated by his two souls, that of confrontation and that of the pact, that of the hyperventilated but sterile rhetoric and that of the concrete but expensive pact. In recent weeks, the inflamed have discovered, astonished, that the pactistas, without rhetoric but with facts, can show off gains, even if it is at the cost of cession and contradiction. Deep down, and in a Catalan key, what is really at stake these days is whether Junts returns once and for all to politics and abandons the sterile rhetoric that has done him so much damage. That is why it is important to discern very well what he does from what he says, which from now on may have little to do with it.