At the official welcome, Pere Aragonès avoided the Spanish king. Shortly afterwards, the Catalan Republican was sitting at a table with Felipe in Barcelona. The rapprochement is still tentative, but there has not been so much closeness between a separatist head of government and the Spanish monarch for years. The first brief encounter took place in Barcelona a few days ago. The socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also sat at the table at the opening of the “Mobile World Congress” on Sunday evening. He and Aragonès said goodbye in Barcelona with the words "see you Tuesday". Then the Catalan left-wing Republican, whose ERC party traditionally fights for an independent Catalan republic without a king, makes his inaugural visit to the Moncloa Palace in Madrid.
Hans-Christian Roessler
Political correspondent for the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb, based in Madrid.
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Pedro Sánchez will receive the newly elected Catalan regional president at the Spanish seat of government in order to hammer in further stakes.
After the pardon of the nine leading separatists a week ago, Sánchez wants representatives of both governments to return as soon as possible to the “dialogue table” they left after just one meeting more than a year and a half ago.
He sees an "enormous opportunity" for resolving the political conflict, said Sánchez on Monday in an interview with the Spanish broadcaster "Cadena Ser".
"No Spain without Catalonia or Catalonia without Spain"
However, Sánchez does not want to know anything about a new independence referendum based on the Scottish model - this time in agreement with the central government in Madrid - as Aragonès is also calling for. "The constitution is not a dogma, but it marks the territory on which we can conduct a dialogue," said the prime minister in the radio interview. At the same time he affirmed that he could not imagine "no Spain without Catalonia or Catalonia without Spain". To make it clear how important the region is to them, Sánchez and the King are in Barcelona more often than seldom before. Felipe will be back on Thursday, this time with his entire family.
But political legacies make the new beginning, which Sánchez is trying to achieve, more difficult. On the day of his meeting with Aragonès, the Spanish Court of Auditors summoned three of the nine separatists who had been released from prison only a week earlier by the government. Former government members Oriol Junqueras, Jordi Turull and Raül Romeva are among the 39 politicians and officials who will be presented with a bill that, according to press reports, could amount to around ten million euros. The former regional presidents Artur Mas and Carles Puigdemont should also pay. The same goes for the internationally renowned economist and former Minister for Economic Affairs, Andreu Mas-Colell.
The Court of Auditors has set out in detail how they allegedly misused taxpayers' money to push ahead with the secession of Catalonia from Spain between 2011 and 2017. The focus is on the independence referendum on October 1, 2017, which the Spanish judiciary declared illegal, and the international activities in support of this plan. In particular, it concerns the activities and expenses of Catalan representative offices abroad and the “Council for Public Diplomacy” (Diplocat), which dealt with the foreign press. The accused criticize that they have too little time to react to the partly ill-founded allegations.
"My parents' house, my father's pension and his bank account can be confiscated by authorities without due process," writes Princeton economist Alex Mas about what threatens his father Andreu Mas-Colell and the other accused: all of you Private assets could be used for damages through the decision of the Court of Auditors. The members of the Court of Auditors do not have to be lawyers, they are appointed by both Houses of Parliament. More than 12,000 people - including 33 Nobel Prize winners - have since signed a petition in which they express "deeply concerned" about the trial against Andreu Mas-Colell.