You only need to momentarily lift your gaze from the document signed between the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and Together for Catalonia (Junts) and look at the enormous uproar that has been conjured up among right-wing parties, the Spanish media, all the associations of judges and prosecutors and tax inspectors, and the urgent statements from various organizations, from the business group CEOE to the Episcopal Conference, denouncing and opposing the signing, in order to take the measure of the accord with which it is assumed that Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont have - while we still wait for the PNV - fired the starter's gun for the Spanish legislature. The four pages of the agreement open up expectations of change: from the amnesty to a face-to-face negotiation to address the national recognition of Catalonia, at which Junts will propose the holding of a self-determination referendum on the country's political future. Also a modification of the LOFCA legislation on the autonomous communities so that an exception clause is established in Catalonia, recognizing the singularity of organization of its institutional system and facilitating the transfer to the Generalitat of 100% of all taxes paid within its territory.
The agreement itself is, above all, a motorway along which one can travel from a kind of preamble - the section is called Antecedentes - that PSOE and Junts share, in their explanation of why we have reached this current point. Both parties go back to the Nueva Planta decrees "which abolished the constitutions and secular institutions of Catalonia", a consequence of the fall of Barcelona in 1714. They also note that linguistic and cultural issues have been subject to severe legal limitations, and even to bans and active persecution, to arrive at the conclusion, from both parties, that this has meant that "a significant part of Catalan society has not felt identified with the system in force in Spain". As this Thursday marked the ninth anniversary of the 9-N consultation of 2014, the balancing act carried out in referring to both this and the 1-O referendum of 2017 is significant. "The Catalan institutions promoted, first, a popular consultation on November 9th, 2014, and then an independence referendum on October 1st, 2017 - both suspended and subsequently annulled by the TC - with a massive turn-out in favour of the independence of Catalonia," the document states.
But the importance of the document and its future expectations must be sought in two points: the amnesty and the international mechanism that will have the functions of supporting, verifying and monitoring the entire negotiation process and the agreements that are reached. The amnesty law will include both leaders and participants who, before and after the 2014 consultation and the 2017 referendum, were the subject of judicial decisions or processes linked to these events. The acceptance of lawfare, which has been subject to exhaustive discussion by the two parties, is reached via an indirect route: "The conclusions of investigative committees that will be set up in the next legislature will be taken into account in the application of the amnesty law on the extent that coverage could be given to situations embodied in the concept of 'lawfare' or the judicialization of politics, with the consequences that, where appropriate, these may lead to actions of responsibility or legislative change". What we see here is what has been, and continues to be, one of the battle horses, and we will see how the amnesty law resolves it when it is presented to the Congress of Deputies on Monday.
And what remains is the part that will end up being the cornerstone of the agreement: the international verification mechanism. This element, not called a table because Junts regards that name as cursed and instead referred to as a "mechanism", will meet monthly, and is converted by Puigdemont's party into a permanent "I give you, you give me", or if not, the legislature will collapse and new elections will be held, and thus the route to be taken could be important. For Junts, the fact that it has no patches of power to defend - the party is outside the main Catalan institutions - should allow it to concentrate on defending the position in Madrid and chipping off power in each negotiation. And raising the most controversial issues with the authority given by its seven deputies.
This will be, from now on, the game to be played and the real thermometer to assess the temperature of the agreement signed this Thursday in Brussels.