This Monday afternoon has seen the first official meeting of the Catalan president-in-exile, Carles Puigdemont, with one of the Spanish Socialist (PSOE) negotiators, in the talks over the investiture of Pedro Sánchez as leader of a new government in Spain. The meeting was held in Brussels, at the offices of the Together for Catalonia (Junts) MEPs at the European Parliament, according to a statement released by the PSOE, and was attended by the organizational secretary of the Socialist party, Santos Cerdán, in addition to two senior MEPs from the party, the president of the Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament, Iratxe García-Pérez, and the head of the party's delegation at the EU chamber, Javier Moreno. On behalf of Junts, Puigdemont was accompanied by the general secretary of the party, Jordi Turull.
At the end of the meeting, the PSOE released an image of the meeting with a statement explaining that the party's number three, Santos Cerdán, had met "with president Carles Puigdemont", and highlighted "the good atmosphere of the meeting" and that the negotiations "are moving in the right direction". Junts published exactly the same statement. In the photograph that was distributed, the immense image of a ballot box from the Catalan independence referendum, which presides over the Junts MEPs' office, appears as the backdrop of the meeting, an image that, at the request of MEPs from the Ciudadanos party, was censored from an exhibition organized by the pro-independence party at the beginning of September in the European Parliament.
The meeting complies with one of the demands that Junts had raised, demanding recognition of the Catalan president as the main negotiator from exile. In addition, the encounter in the Belgian capital follows the meeting celebrated at the weekend, when Pedro Sánchez defended the amnesty before the PSOE federal committee as one of the elements of the negotiation with Junts to permit the investiture of a new Socialist-led government to go ahead.
Moreno, García-Pérez, Cerdán, Puigdemont and Turull.
The meeting between Puigdemont and the Socialist delegation takes place almost two months after the president-in-exile met the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, also at Junts's offices in the European Parliament on September 4th. The day after that meeting, Puigdemont gave an address in Brussels at which he set out the conditions that Junts demanded to start negotiations for the investiture, including the recognition of the democratic legitimacy of the independence movement, an amnesty and a mechanism for verification and control of agreements reached in the conflict resolution process.
The PSOE has been aware for weeks that the recognition demanded by Junts would require, as a preliminary to the rubric of an agreement, a photograph in Brussels of a member of the Socialist leadership with Puigdemont. From PSOE headquarters it was made clear that it would not be Sánchez himself who featured in the image, nor would he appear with the leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, or with the leader of EH Bildu, Arnaldo Otegi, but at the same time the party warned that it would only accept such an image if the pact was finalised. However, Junts sources say that the deal is not yet closed.
Rival in the European chamber
The president of the Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament, Iratxe García-Perez, one of those who attended the meeting, has been one of the voices most critical over the entry of Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín into the Eruopean chamber in December 2019. At that time she had a strong and much-commented discussion with the-then president of the chamber, David Sassoli, which featured shouting, tears and the throwing of papers onto the floor. Later, she was also one of those who defended the Spanish judicial request to lift the parliamentary immunity of the three pro-independence MEPs.