Little by little, some unknowns are being resolved that, although they seemed clear, return driven by the PSOE’s need to dominate the story about the investiture and justify the agreements. Once the amnesty path was revealed, the next step was the socialists’ alleged demand that Junts renounce unilateralism, without which an agreement did not seem possible.
It was a life-saving request, presented in terms of punishment and forgiveness, that did not respect the ideology of the party from which the votes were asked. In fact, ‘president’ Puigdemont and Junts were required to abandon their political identity and become a mutant of indefinite nature. Doomed to failure from the moment it was proposed, Puigdemont has given him the final blow in an Instagram post that allows no ambiguity: “The State has a dilemma of complex resolution. Either it repeats elections, with the risk that the political balances will be as fragile as now; or it makes an agreement with a party that maintains the legitimacy of October 1 and that has not renounced nor will it renounce unilaterality as a legitimate resource to assert its rights”. Ergo, dear Sánchez, this way, pumpkins… In fact, it was so obvious that it would not be accepted that PSOE itself denied that it had raised it as a demand, although the deep throats refute the denial. That is to say, if this was an obstacle, the PSOE has already jumped over it, if only because it has no choice.
Two out of three, the third obstacle remains to seriously sit down to negotiate the investiture, and this is also a tough nut to crack for the socialists: an international mediator to attest to the agreements, given the atavistic distrust of the independence movement with the word of the State. This request would not even reach the level of a hypothesis a few months ago, but the electoral results have demonstrated great skill in the art of working miracles, so It is not risky to predict that the socialists will also accept this request. Reluctantly, sure, and with all the ‘spin doctors’ doing rhetorical engineering to be able to publicly sell acceptance, but they have no alternative if they do not want to fail in the investiture.
The melon of self-determination
At this point, and with the previous three resolved, the dilemma that Pedro Sánchez will find himself in lies in the underlying nature of the agreement. As Ferran Requejo said in ‘Ara’, a pact based, for example, on the amnesty and the transfer of Rodalies would be a bad agreementbecause the only thing that can represent a qualitative leap in Catalonia – a historic agreement, in the words of Puigdemont – must address cultural and economic issues, but, above all, it must open the way to resolve the melon of self-determination. Obviously, it is not feasible before the investiture, but four years of legislature, with a well-tied and accredited pact, gives room.
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At this point, we should begin to discard some more or less imaginative ideas that make a lot of media noise, but that are not in the imaginary of the historic agreement that Waterloo seeks. On the one hand, Comuns’ attempts to constrict the agreement in an alleged pseudo-federalist understanding which, in reality, rules out any option to vote in Catalonia. And on the other, the surreal option of the clarity agreement, an increasingly alien option that is not only rejected by the vast majority of the independence movement – from parties to organizations – but Waterloo does not even consider it as a hypothesis. In this sense, the stubbornness of ‘president’ Aragonès in maintaining this idea doomed to failure from the preamble can only respond to the desperation of ERC to try to maintain a relevance that it has lost.
It does not seem, therefore, that there are alternative paths. Sánchez will face the real dilemma, the underlying one, sooner rather than later, on his way to the investiture: how Catalonia will be able to vote. It is true, as has been said before, that he will not have the pressure to close this aspect before being sworn in as president, because a historic agreement of this nature requires a lot of time and a lot of negotiation. But it will have the pressure to commit, in writing and before a mediatorabout the beginning of the process to find the way out. Only then will the agreement be historic. And it seems that only then will Sánchez be president.