This Monday, Carles Puigdemont marked the end of his investiture agreement with the PSOE, although the leader of Junts has also been careful to distance himself from any possible alliance with PP and Vox to overthrow the Executive. “We will not help this Government or any other that does not help Catalonia,” said the former president, who, however, has mentioned a long string of reproaches to show that, despite the effort he has used, the negotiation with the socialists has not worked.
It has been 24 months of a rocky relationship, of great mutual distrust despite the fact that there have been relevant agreements, with the amnesty as the main milestone.
Initial tuning and agreements for Catalan
The relationship between the PSOE and Junts was unexpected until the night of July 23, 2023, when the votes of the independentistas tipped the balance regarding the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. The then secretary of the socialist organization, Santos Cerdán, had already opened a discreet relationship with them, which is why the beginning of the conversations was easier.
However, from the election night itself it was clear that Junts, contrary to what it had said during the campaign, was open to talking about Sánchez's investiture. The elections had given Puigdemont a key that he was not willing to lose.
Before negotiating the investiture agreement, socialists and junteros already showed their ability to come to terms with the pact that brought Francina Armengol to the presidency of Congress. They did it in exchange for new steps for Catalan. On the one hand, speaking in any official language in Congress would be allowed. On the other hand, Spain would officially ask the Council of Europe to recognize Catalan, Galician and Basque as official languages at the European level.
Both things happened, so Junts ended up supporting Armengol. A few months later, on November 9, 2023, Junts and the PSOE closed the so-called “Brussels agreement”, which allowed the investiture of Pedro Sánchez
The difficult amnesty negotiation
The first big test that the relationship between Junts and the PSOE had to pass was the negotiation of the amnesty law, a legally complicated rule that was difficult to fit constitutionally. The teams of the two pro-independence parties and the Government negotiated tirelessly during the first months of 2024. There were comings and goings, countless modifications to the draft and negotiations 'in extremis'. In parallel, the Supreme Court moved to try to close the possible avenues for amnesty for Puigdemont.
Finally, Congress approved the amnesty law at the end of May 2024. There were dozens of people who no longer had criminal cases, but the pardon measure has not yet affected the majority of the main political leaders of 2017. Neither the leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, nor Puigdemont, have enjoyed the amnesty, which has prevented them from returning to active politics, the former; and Spanish territory, in the case of Junts.
The Constitutional Court has already issued sentences that endorse the bulk of the amnesty law: its legality, its fit with the Constitution and that, among other crimes, it can forgive the embezzlement of public funds related to the process. But it has not yet decided on the specific case of Carles Puigdemont and that, in practice, keeps the former president under search and capture within Spain by order of Judge Pablo Llarena and the Supreme Court.
His appeal was recently admitted for processing and the deliberations of the Constitutional Court will test the Supreme Court's arguments for not granting amnesty for the embezzlement attributed to Puigdemont and other already convicted politicians: that by using public means to organize the 2017 referendum they avoided putting that money out of their pockets, and therefore became richer. Also that the economic interests of the European Union were compromised.
The court already touched on this debate when it rejected Aragón's appeal, although the speaker, Laura Díez, even modified her presentation to remove several paragraphs that could be interpreted as an advance estimate of Puigdemont's arguments. The sentence that will decide whether or not he can return to Spain without fear of being arrested will not arrive before next year.
“Sánchez is not trustworthy”
Despite the initial optimism and the agreements reached, the end of 2024 represented a moment of anxiety in the negotiations between Junts and the PSOE in Switzerland. The game was now about the delegation of powers regarding immigration, a measure that Puigdemont's party had put in the spotlight after the xenophobic group Aliança Catalana surprised and sneaked into the Parliament in June of that year.
The negotiation was blocked, as Junts understood, because the Ministry of the Interior refused to delegate to the Generalitat some more core powers in matters of foreigners. It was then that Puigdemont made the appearance that was the great wake-up call for the PSOE. “Sánchez is not trustworthy,” said the Junts leader, who added that the PSOE was failing to comply with the signed agreement and demanded that the president submit to a question of trust.
That question of trust, which Junts could claim but which was only Sánchez's responsibility to raise before Congress, gave a lot to talk about in the following weeks. Finally, the PSOE managed to get Junts to withdraw the motion in which it required Sánchez to take that step and, in parallel, a text of delegation of powers was agreed upon.
That proposal for the transfer of powers, however, was discarded last September, when it did not achieve a majority in Congress due to the rejection of Podemos. A fiasco that was a hard blow to the management of Junts.
Junts flirts with PP and Vox
One of the phenomena that has dominated the relationship between Junts and the PSOE in the last stage has been an increasingly irreconcilable distance. Cerdán's fall from grace, due to his involvement in the so-called Koldo plot, left the independence supporters without one of their pillars, who was unofficially replaced in the Swiss meetings by a name as important as former president José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero.
Regarding parliamentary dynamics, although during the first year of collaboration Junts only withdrew from 25% of the Government's proposals, according to this newspaper's count, in the second year that relationship was overshadowed by disagreements. Those from Puigdemont overturned the tax on energy companies, the reduction of working hours, the creation of an anti-corruption agency and they also did not support one of the last omnibus decrees because they considered that it camouflaged measures that had not been negotiated with them.
The votes in which Junts ended up appearing in the photo with the PP and Vox, which were previously taboo for Puigdemont's party, became frequent in Congress during the last months of the last parliamentary year. “The speech that if you don't vote for Pedro Sánchez, the PP and Vox come does not impress us at all,” Jordi Turull advanced last year.
The end: more divorce than infidelity
Carles Puigdemont solemnized this Monday an end to the interested alliance that he had formed two years ago. He has done so with harsh reproaches and recognizing that, although he initially believed it was possible to overcome mistrust, two years later he believed that he had made a mistake.
But Puigdemont has made it clear that, although there is an obvious divorce with the PSOE, Junts is not thinking of looking for new investiture partners. The motion of censure is a ghost that the independentists invoke as a threat, but that does not appear today among the realistic options they are considering.
The idea of the Junts Executive is a PSOE that sits alone in the Government and without the ability to carry out anything on its legislative agenda. “They will have power, but they will not be able to govern,” Puigdemont summarized. The former president continues to maintain votes that are key to governability and continues to need the amnesty law to be applied to him, exactly the situation with which the relationship was born that is now broken, but no one knows if it could be rebuilt.