The answers from Madrid to Catalan president Pere Aragonès have only taken a few hours. Spanish government parties have rushed on Monday to ask the president of the Generalitat for patience. The PSOE’s spokesperson, Felipe Sicilia, has avoided specifying the future meeting’s date, and has recalled that the main concern right now is the pandemic, but defused the situation by ensuring that the dialogue table remains the main option. For his part, Unidas Podemos parliamentary spokesperson, Pablo Echenique, has recommended to the Catalan delegation "not to put deadlines to dialogue over the media".
In his speech on December 26th, from the Rosselló Pòrcel school in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Pere Aragonès defended yesterday the need to "start building alternatives" in case the negotiation with the State, the dialogue table, gets stuck and does not bring the expected results. The president of the Generalitat assured that 2022 "must be the year in which we begin to unblock the conflict with the State, in which the negotiation advances and starts providing tangible results", because "we must start offering an answer to the vast majority of citizens who know that the resolution of the conflict with the State passes through the exercise of the right to self-determination and amnesty".
In a press conference this Monday at noon, the spokesperson of the PSOE executive, Felipe Sicilia, reiterated that the objective of both the party and the Spanish government is maintaining the commitment to "establish channels for dialogue and understanding". The socialist leader has remarked that "we have always opted for dialogue and understanding within the framework of the Constitution, for a good relationship between the Government of the Generalitat and the government of the State", as he believes is the case at the moment. In this sense, he wanted to "reiterate the commitment".
But, beyond that, Felipe Sicilia did not go into the details of an upcoming meeting, which he left in the hands of the two delegations. Although the PSOE spokesperson assured that the sixth wave of the coronavirus "does not invalidate" the maintenance of the dialogue table, he also pointed out that "the concern at this time" of the two governments "is combating the pandemic, facing the new wave, and for a recovery like the one we are already seeing to be feasible".
Along the same lines, Unidas Podemos has expressed its opinion. In an interview on TVE, its spokesperson in Congress, Pablo Echenique, defended that "the main thing is not so much the deadlines as the fact that a historical dynamic of conflict has been changed for a very different dynamic, one of dialogue and agreement". That is why, without going into the substance of the case —"it is normal" that ERC asks for independence because it is "what it has asked for all its existence"—, Echenique has responded to Catalan president Aragonès that "there is no need to set deadlines for dialogue over the media".