They are so few the politicians from outside Catalonia, and, above all, from Madrid, who have a minimum of personal empathy with the political prisoners or the exiles, that when a voice like José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's speaks, he needs to at least be listened to. The former president was responsible of two things diametrically opposed to each other during his mandate: the start of the process for Catalonia's Home Rule law -Estatut- (the Catalan Constitution within the Spanish Constitution), but also its braking and mutilation in the Spanish Congress. Under his mandate, the Constitutional Court issued that unacceptable ruling severing the text of the Estatut, the Catalan Constitution when it had already been voted via referendum by the people of Catalonia. That decision was the beginning of the pro-independence movement as we know it today, of the mass rallies, the consultation of the 9th November 2014, the 1st October 2017 referendum and the declaration of independence.
The former presidents of the Spanish government are like one of those ornaments, that, wherever they are, they are a nuisance. They have not got the status as they do in other countries, and their role becomes unrecognised and insignificant. Two of the former Spanish presidents, Felipe González and José Maria Aznar, have slipped free of their shackles, whenever they have been able to, to intervene in domestic politics and trying to have top influence within their own ranks. This is not the case of Zapatero, who aside from having the role of managing the worst Spanish economic crisis, he has in his credit the establishment of the basis for the solution of the armed conflict in the Basque Country and the termination of violence by the Basque terrorist organisation ETA. This is, in historical terms, his greatest success, and who knows if also one of the reasons why he poses himself the question of whether he can play a part in the Catalan conflict and what this needs to entail, since he is not representing anybody and would only honor the position of ex-president which, well played, could have a wide potential scope.
This last Tuesday, in his radio programme El món a Rac1, Jordi Basté elicited from Zapatero that he had conversed with Oriol Junqueras in prison and that he was quite well informed through a good friend, of Puigdemont's movements. A few, very few actually, in Madrid, are able to say this, and the ones who can claim something similar would not dare doing so for fear of being insulted when going about in the Spanish capital. Basté, skilled, got hold of this piece of information and, among other things, also elicited from Zapatero that he was hoping for a sentence that does not compromise the dialogue between Catalonia and Spain. That was enough for the right wing parties to come out of their respective internal crises for some minutes. What was that, that Zapatero had said? Why dialogue, when speaking with pro-independence leaders is almost a crime and what it is really intended is as harsh as possible a penalty? Why indeed?
Obviously, the dialogue is still raw, very raw. Not so much from the pro-independence side, as it was clear last December when the two governments met in Barcelona's Pedralbes palace, as the Catalan side is the one ready to sit at the table, but on the side of the State Government, conditioned by the infernal dynamics of the Spanish politics. However, dialogue shall need to be reinstated, without renunciations but without vetoes either. And with the ballot boxes always as a referent to listen to the people.