The Catalan Socialist leader, Miquel Iceta, responded on Monday morning to the letter addressed to him by imprisoned ERC party leader Oriol Junqueras, published through ElNacional.cat. Iceta reminded the pro-independence politician Junqueras that it was the Supreme Court that convicted him and not the Socialists. Iceta rejected the idea of visiting him in prison. "With a letter like this, no," he said.
In the letter, Junqueras asks Iceta to visit him in prison to tell him, face to face, where he thinks the justice is in the 13-year jail sentence he was given for sedition, "if he has a clear conscience," and he reminds the Socialist leader that, once, he too was in favour of Catalonia's right to decide its own future.
Thus, Junqueras was asking Iceta to carry out an exercise in honesty, in the same way as, in his opinion, exiled minister Clara Ponsatí did, when she affirmed that Catalonia's 2017 declaration of independence was a bluff, or like the former speaker of the Catalan parliament, Carme Forcardell, "when she recognized that that they had forgotten half of the country."
The Catalan Socialist head asserted that the letter is an attempt to gain his political support "for something that does not have our political support." "We would not want it to be thought that we support political errors that will not only be paid for by those who made them, but also by the whole country," he added.
Iceta has called on the independence movement to become conscious of its mistakes and try to be realistic. "We warned them on many occasions that breaking the law has high costs and doesn't lead anywhere."
The Catalan Socialists, according to party organizational secretary Salvador Illa, would like Junqueras himself to tell the truth to Catalans and say that there is no majority for independence. "Let him dare to do that, in the same way as Forcadell said that there was a lack of empathy with half of the Catalans," he asserted.