A direct message to Pere Aragonès. Together for Catalonia (Junts) has appealed to the president of the Generalitat to "preserve institutional dignity" and to avoid "that reality becomes falsified" in the context of this Thursday's summit meeting. The party's spokesperson, Josep Rius, has warned that the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, and the French head of state, Emmanuel Macron, "seek to portray the end of the independence process" in an attempt to "falsify the political reality of Catalonia and the reality represented in the Parliament of Catalonia, where the pro-independence parties represents 52%" of voters. For this reason, Rius stated that his party "respects" Aragonès's decision to attend the summit, but that the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) leader should state "that the process is not over and that it will be when we are an independent state".
The Junts party calls on the Catalan public to take part in the united demonstration by the independence movement this Thursday at the four columns of Puig i Cadafalch, very close to where the Spain-France summit will be held, at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). "It is not a question of filling chairs, but of filling the streets against those want to regard the independence process as buried", claimed Josep Rius.
The government, a "hostage of the PSC"
With reference to the budget negotiations, Junts has again said that they will not leave the table. However, Rius pointed out that "the government is negotiating badly and in a labyrinthine way, it is agreeing on contradictory issues with different groups" and that this is precisely "one of the causes of the delay in the agreement" on the budget. "With Junts they started to negotiate late and now ERC seems to be an all-or-nothing hostage of the PSC", he declared. In this regard, the party vice-president reiterated that the government "must choose between a budget to move the country forward with us or one that will take it backwards with the Socialists, because they will endanger key aspects of self-government".
Josep Rius specified that there are still "major challenges" to be resolved, naming issues such as "fair" taxation, assistance for SMEs with their energy bills and projects such as the Hard Rock centre, the Fourth Beltway and the expansion of El Prat airport. The spokesperson also assessed that "it is noticeable that Junts is not in the government because things are worse than a year ago", alluding to the fact that there is still no 2023 budget, "while at this date last year, it was already in force."
Regarding the reform of the Spanish Penal Code, Rius described it as a "bungle" and expressed Junts's "extreme concern" for the "interpretation that the judges will make". "In the case of president Puigdemont, we have already seen that they have applied the most harmful and aggravated interpretation," he warned, detailing that "it will be necessary to see what happens with the political prisoners from the October 1st trial and with Puigdemont", but that, if it is in line with the decrees that the judges have issued so far, "the reform will only have been useful to maintain and guarantee repression, beyond achieving a personal solution". "It is not a covert amnesty: it is a new opportunity for Marchena and Llarena to persecute the pro-independence leaders and to persecute, in particular, Puigdemont," he replied.