I would have liked to have been mistaken in the prediction I made yesterday, but subtleties aside, the encounter between Pedro Sánchez and Quim Torra followed the script expected: a carefully-portrayed image of the Spanish prime minister as open to dialogue, avoiding any commitments related to the pro-independence agenda, and a Catalan president swerving and sidestepping so as not to get trapped in the concepts of a Spain of autonomous regions as projected by his guest. Since Sánchez will in any case receive criticism and contempt from the political and media right wing through the front pages of the Madrid press - a consequence of the virulence unleashed against his coalition government and the Catalan Republican Left's support for its creation - it is noteworthy that the Spanish prime minister has skilfully created a broad agenda of meetings during the day and a half that he is to spend in Barcelona. Thus, his appointment with Torra is heavily damped among meetings with other political, social and trade union actors who are fully identified with his political line.
If that were not enough, the first goal of the media narrative was scored by the Spanish government at the start of the meeting, by presenting a document in which Sánchez made 44 proposals to Torra with a title as unattractive as "Open agenda document for the reencounter"; and the second point was also won by Sánchez, through the fact that he appeared first at the post-meeting press conference, and was thus able to define its framing. The Catalan government could only respond to these two conceded goals with a carefully groomed image at the moment that the president received his Spanish counterpart a few metres from the façade of the Generalitat palace. It was enough for the two politicians to greet each other under the banner presiding over the institution's balcony, which reads "Freedom of opinion and expression."
In the absence of anything substantive from the meeting at Plaça Sant Jaume, the news of the day was, without a doubt, that the Lledoners Prison assessment board has decided that Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez will be granted permission to leave prison during the day, based on article 100.2 of the prison regulations. Consequently, Cuixart will be outside the gates for 9.5 hours a day, five days a week, to go to work, while Sànchez will leave the jail three days a week, for 11 hours per day. It is not a privilege and there are hundreds of prisoners at Lledoners who, after serving one quarter of their prison sentence, receive the same treatment. The king's brother in law, Iñaki Urdangarin, who leaves jail every day to carry out volunteer work, also benefits from this provision. It is a small first step, not the amnesty which is necessary due to an unjust trial and sentence and must be demanded every day from the institutions, from Parliament, from the parties, from the organizations and from the street.
We'll have to wait and see what the prosecutors do and if they appeal this measure - I bet they will - and it continues to be highly ironic that this situation must be dealt with by the new public prosecutor in chief, former justice minister, Dolores Delgado, who has been appointed to her current position in order to reduce the judicialization of Catalan politics. This, after Sánchez himself boasted of the public prosecutors' office being under his control. Here again we will have to wait and see whether the change is solely cosmetic or goes further and allows a horizon of negotiation to be imagined.