After seven years and nine months, the time that has passed since Pedro Sánchez, then head of the Spanish opposition, travelled to the Palau de la Generalitat to meet Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, the two politicians of the moment have finally come face to face once again. Both of them with seriously winced expressions, but also holding out olive branches, took part in a jousting contest in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in which Puigdemont challenged Sánchez without threatening him while the Spanish prime minister, with courtesy rather than with results, invited the pro-independence politician to take advantage of the amnesty law to open a new era. The bid to make Catalan an official language in Europe will, for now, continue in limbo, waiting for the PSOE to feel the independentists breathing down their neck again and remedy the slow execution of the agreements they entered into before the investiture.
"Today the situation in Catalonia is infinitely better and we will continue to improve it. I want to tell Mr Puigdemont that it is in our hands to achieve it," Sánchez told him from the lectern in Strasbourg, referring to the amnesty law. Earlier, the exiled president had reproached him for the scant progress on Catalan's status in Europe, already having passed through five fruitless meetings of the EU General Affairs Council, in which the foreign ministries of the 27 member countries participate. The Spanish presidency has not secured the objective and now the portfolio is passed on to the Belgian leadership, who will hold the rotating EU presidency after January 1st. Sánchez, who had more time to speak in Strasbourg, since he was able to come to the lectern both at the beginning of the debate and in the final part, was comfortable talking about the amnesty and with the lesson well learned.
His duel with the president of the European People's Party group, Germany's Manfred Weber, of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, ended with the conservative reticent and reeling. With the PP-Vox alliances in many Spanish autonomous communities and the change in the nomenclature of many streets, which are to recover names from the Francoist past, that was enough. "Would this also be his plan for Germany, to return the names of the leaders of the Third Reich to the streets and squares of Berlin?" asserted Sánchez amid uproar from the right and the far right. Weber, impacted and overwhelmed, could only muster an explanation that was too poor for a session of such dialectical tension.
Puigdemont and Sánchez satisfied their respective parishes, amid a discomfort that was obvious since there were no gestures of a complicity that does not yet exist
Puigdemont only had one minute, like the rest of the participating MEPs. Enough time for his message to the leader of the PSOE to be explicit and for the warning bell to be sounded: "Prime minister Sánchez, opportunities must be used when they present themselves, if they are missed due to fear or incapacity, the consequences are not pleasant". He made clear his discontent, even though he left, to be reoriented in Madrid, the first list of non-compliances of this legislature. A short but significant inventory, since if in so few weeks it already reflects a considerable lack of seriousness, it is better not to think about how it might develop from here, without doing something similar to what Artur Mas suggested on Tuesday in an interview with Xavier Graset on Més 324, when he stressed the need for permanent pressure on the Socialists so that they don't relax.
Puigdemont and Sánchez satisfied their respective parishes, in all probability. They did so despite a discomfort that was obvious since there were no gestures of a complicity that does not yet exist. Sánchez's lost expression while Puigdemont spoke, with Albares, the minister responsible for advancing the Catalan language question, sitting next to him. Meanwhile, in Madrid the battle of the amnesty completed another day amid threats from the Spanish justice system. Nothing new. But disturbing.