What's behind Junts' slamming the door on the PSOE?
From a place of distrust and distance from the PSOE, Junts began a negotiation process two years ago, announcing that it would receive advance payment. It soon came to terms with political reality and had to lower expectations for its electorate. Its strength lay in the fact that its votes were essential for a majority in Pedro Sánchez's investiture, and they have continued to be so to provide a minimum of stability to the Spanish government. Its weakness was, and is, that on the other side, there is no one with whom to negotiate, given the PP's increasing drift toward far-right and hard-line Spanish nationalism due to pressure from Vox. That is why the split now announced by the party's leader, Carles Puigdemont, is limited to explicitly stating that there will be no negotiations with the Socialists for the 2026 state budget and that no negotiations there, neither in Switzerland nor anywhere else, are over. But even so, Junts will not bring down Sánchez. That is, Puigdemont's votes will not be added to those of the PP-Vox to trigger an early election.
Together has grown tired of the PSOE's failures to comply, which, in effect, and despite important gestures, such as the fact that after decades of democracy Catalan can finally be used in Congress, in many crucial areas they have not made the agreed progress: in particular, the inapplicability of the amnesty law, the lack of Catalan in the gesture, has been painful. in extremis last week to try to dislodge Germany, the pending transfer of immigration powers, or the lack of explicit national recognition of Catalonia.
All these reasons are perfectly real and obvious. But so is the fact that the pro-independence right feels harassed by the advance of Sílvia Orriols's party, Aliança Catalana. Faced with the threat posed by the Islamophobic far-right, Puigdemont has been forced to close the dialogue stage with the Socialists, something that simultaneously serves to distance himself from an ERC (Republican Revolutionary Army) that maintains negotiations with the PSOE for the singular financing. And in passing, Puigdemont allows himself to attribute to the PSC part of the responsibility for the failure of the Junts-PSOE dialogue and accuse the Socialist president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, of "Spanishizing Catalonia."
Puigdemont, then, is breaking bridges with the Socialists in an operation that already looks toward a new electoral cycle, although the PSOE, out of pragmatism and the need to remain in power, has reacted by keeping the door open to agreements: "We will continue to offer [Juntos] what it is, what it has been, and what it has been." But it is difficult to underestimate the extremely weak situation in which Pedro Sánchez's balancing act now finds itself. And, from a Catalan perspective, no one can fail to see that his fall would frustrate a hypothetical agreement for singular financing and open the doors to a possible PP-Vox government that, for all intents and purposes—language, Catalan school, transfer of the commuter rail system, investments, etc.—would be lethal to Catalonia's self-government.
