The imminent holding of general elections and the plausible change of cycle in the governability of the State fully impacts the plans of Pere Aragonès to negotiate an independence referendum agreed with the Government and internationally homologated.

The president of the Generalitat commissioned a council of wise men appointed for the occasion a month and a half ago to design a clarity agreement to the Canadian to establish the bases of the independence vote. The report of the Sanhedrin should be ready this June, and then discuss it at a table with the Catalan political groups, but, as EL MUNDO has learned, the Generalitat moved last week to its experts who have until September to present their conclusions. The intention is clear: to freeze the draft of the referendum until it is seen if Pedro Sánchez continues to govern; to know if in La Moncloa is still installed an interlocutor in favor of bilateral negotiation with the Generalitat.

Sources of that group of experts consider, however, that the results of the municipal elections – in which ERC was harshly punished – and the forecasts for the generals "dynamite everything". It should be remembered that Aragonès was open to modifying the road map of his party after losing 302,000 votes in the local elections to move from dialogue alone with the State to a "common front" with all the independence forces. He did so knowing that Junts and the CUP privilege the unilateral way to consummate secession.

It so happens that the repudiation of the negotiation with the PSOE also gains ground among the militancy of ERC, especially among its critical sector. This was transferred to the leadership in an assembly held last Tuesday and chaired by the president of the party, Oriol Junqueras and its general secretary Marta Rovira.

Negotiation phase "exhausted"

Militants framed in the so-called Col·lectiu Primer d'Octubre told the party leadership that "we must change the strategy carried out so far." "The negotiation strategy has not yielded results, this phase has been exhausted, it has not widened the base and, therefore, we must move from the policy of making things easier in Madrid and dialoguing to putting sticks in the wheels to the State just as the State is putting sticks in the wheels to us", defended Xavier Martinez, leader of the critical group of the Republicans.

In conversation with this newspaper, Martínez maintains that the clarity agreement was not even addressed in the assembly despite constituting the central element of the negotiating strategy defended by the ERC leadership. "It is part of this stage that has not borne fruit," adds the spokesman for the Col·lectiu Primer d'Octubre, who defends other actions such as "always speaking in Catalan in Congress."

During the internal meeting, militants who questioned the continuity of Gabriel Rufián as a candidate for the generals also took the floor. "They have pulled straight pressed by the calendar," says Martinez, who clarifies that they will fight to include in other places of the list of ERC to Congress to voices of the critical sector.

The reaction of the Republican leadership was to avoid self-criticism. Junqueras alleged that, "although those of the municipal elections were not the expected results, they were the second best results in the history of ERC", which in 2019 won for the first time the local elections in Catalonia.

Rovira, for his part, intervened from Geneva to allege that abstention was the central element that harmed the Republicans and stressed that what did the most damage to the party was the loss of votes among "the most convinced independentist." The one that warns in the negotiation with the Government and the pact of clarity an erroneous strategy.

  • CKD
  • Generalitat of Catalonia
  • Gabriel Rufián
  • Marta Rovira
  • Oriol Junqueras
  • PSOE
  • CUP
  • Pedro Sanchez
  • THE WORLD
  • Pere Aragonès

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