The legislative period has just begun and Junts per Catalunya's stance is already testing the patience of members of the investiture majority that supports the government. After bringing the executive to the brink last week in the vote on the decrees with anti-crisis measures and reforms demanded by Brussels, the Independence Party once again unsettled the rest of the parties by presenting the draft law last Tuesday, changing the proposed amendments Amnesty law, in extreme cases and without any justification. When all the other groups involved in the initiative assumed that these amendments would be processed together, Junts stepped forward with its own initiatives and eventually pulled Esquerra Republicana (ERC) along the same path.
There is agreement among groups supporting the government: one of the biggest difficulties in advancing in the legislature will be the competition between Junts and ERC. Carles Puigdemont's party is often unpredictable, even for those who are used to dealing with him. And he has also made every effort to show that he is a much more decisive and effective negotiator than his Republican rival in the Catalan independence camp has been over the past four years. The entire bloc that supported Pedro Sánchez's inauguration fears that this attitude will worsen as regional elections approach in Catalonia, where the current legislative period ends in early 2025.
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What happened this Tuesday with the changes to the amnesty law only increased this concern. There was an unwritten pact among all the groups supporting the initiative not to present a single amendment and to promote only a few technical adjustments in a text that, according to its supporters, is already very cautious given the certainty that this will be the case examined with a microscopic magnifying glass when the clemency measures are brought to court. ERC had ensured for weeks that it would not submit any change that was not agreed with the other parties. The two Basque nationalist groups and the Galician BNG would limit themselves to agreeing with the decisions of their Catalan co-religionists.
Those involved described this scenario on Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before the 6 p.m. deadline for submitting amendments. Both Socialist sources and sources from the ERC and the Basque groups said that the details were being finalized between the legal teams of each party and that the negotiations were purely technical in nature and had no political content. And so it happened: PSOE, Sumar, ERC, EH Bildu and BNG together signed nine proposals with minor changes.
The unexpected thing was that on the same Tuesday afternoon, just 15 minutes before the deadline for registering these joint amendments, Junts decided to present a dozen alone. Without warning and without making statements that were still unknown 24 hours later at the committee table. When time was running out, ERC, contrary to its announcement, processed another four individual cases in the blink of an eye. The groups supporting the government interpreted that Esquerra reacted this way to avoid projecting the image that Junts is trying to project to her and that it was behaving like a more accommodating partner for Sánchez. The maneuver surprised both the PSOE and Sumar as well as the Basque and Galician nationalists, who assumed that everything had already been agreed between all the formations and that they found out at the limit without having time to react, which caused great discomfort in these formations, as EL PAÍS has confirmed with representatives of all of them.
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The ERC and Junts amendments aim, albeit with different nuances, to extend the pardons granted to pro-independence advocates with pending legal cases to those with final convictions for terrorism, an assumption that was excluded in the original text of the future law . But ERC and Junts seem to have different opinions on how this situation should be specified in the regulation so that it overcomes subsequent filters and legal resources, and this divergence or “spike” between the Catalan independence parties could be the reason for this, according to sources in this Commission the lack of restraint in signing the amendments from Puigdemont's party. Pro-independence advocates justify this demand by what they see as hostility toward the independence movement of judges like Manuel García Castellón of the National Court. This judge has attributed terrorist crimes to Carles Puigdemont and the Secretary General of the ERC, Marta Rovira, both of whom had fled abroad, and holds them responsible for the death of a French tourist due to a heart attack on October 14, 2019 at Barcelona airport. , which was surrounded by activists protesting the litigants' court rulings.
The episode of amendments has confirmed the other groups' unanimous impression: Junts will “make it very difficult” to advance in the legislature. And negotiations on the budget will begin in a month.
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