Junts wants guarantees that the Government will comply with the investiture agreements. This is what the Secretary General of the Party, Jordi Turull, has transferred after meeting with Pedro Sánchez this Tuesday in La Moncloa, as part of the meetings that the president is holding with the parliamentary groups after the corruption scandal that implies the one who until a few days ago was secretary of Organization, Santos Cerdán. Carles Puigdemont's party will not make “hot decisions” but admits that trust with the Socialists was already “to the limit” even before the case broke out.
“Our priority now is to know if this has continuity or not, if it is worth following or if it is not worth the reasons and that it explains it well. To tell us what are the guarantees that it puts on the table for the fulfillment of the Brussels agreements that we sign,” he said in statements to the Turull media, at the gates of Congress. The Secretary General of Junts has appeared before the press, after meeting with Sánchez in La Moncloa with the spokeswoman in the party's congress, Míriam Nogueras.
As explained by Turull, the meeting with the President has served them to verify the “gravity and uncertainty” of the situation, after the publication of the Civil Guard reports that place Santos Cerdán in the center of an alleged plot for corruption of public works in the stage of José Luis Ábalos as Minister of Transportation. After hearing those information, Sánchez decided to call the parliamentary groups to take the temperature of the support he has to continue at the head of the Government.
The Juns leader has detailed that they have spoken quite a while about the case, their reach and the consequences it can have. “What we have explained is that before this whole episode with Santos Cerdán broke out, since last December, we were the limit of trust with the PSOE and we wanted 2023.
As he said, the president of the Government has the will to continue, but has not specified or clarified “how and how” nor “with what measures” plans to respond to the case that affects Santos Cerdán, but also everything that has to do with compliance with the investiture agreements. “What we ask are guarantees and, therefore, will lack more than one meeting to check if there is a willingness to continue and in what way, so that it can respond minimally and we can have compliance with the agreements,” he said.
In November 2023, both formations reached an agreement to unlock the investiture of Sánchez, who hung from the seven deputies of the Catalan independence. That pact contained a commitment from the PSOE to carry out an amnesty law to those prosecuted by the process, already approved, but also other issues such as a new financing formula for Catalonia and also a commitment from the government to promote in Europe the official of the Catalan, the Basque and the gallego.
The relations between Junts and the PSOE, as Turull has pointed out, did not go through their best moment and in fact a few months ago the party of Carles Puigdemont pressed so that the president of the Government underwent a matter of trust. That crisis was settled with an agreement at the negotiating table that both matches keep in Geneva and in which an international mediator feels. It is thanks to that mediator, according to Turull, who at that time decided to continue maintaining a thread of trust.
One of the issues that the conversation has occupied between Sánchez and the leaders of Junts is precisely who will act as an interlocutor in that type of meetings and in general in the dialogue between it and the Socialist Party, a function that Santos Cerdán had played until now. According to Turull, the president has asked them for time to choose a new interlocutor.
“What has happened has shaken everything and we are responsible people, we are people who know about the seriousness of the situation and we will not make hot decisions. We will make decisions thinking about what is best for Catalonia and what we have committed to citizens. It is a first meeting, there must be more and must realize many more things,” he insisted.
