Puigdemont rejects the National Pact for Language: "We must all be involved, especially the main opposition party."

WaterlooThere is a majority consensus among the parties in Catalonia that it is necessary to deploy a roadmap to protect and promote Catalan. However, the long-awaited National Pact for the Language that It will be sealed this Tuesday He will be born lame, without the CUP or Junts. For this reason, on the eve of the signing, Carles Puigdemont disavowed him at a conference – without question time – in Waterloo. "We must all be, especially the first opposition party," the president of Junts insisted.

Now, this does not mean that the former president is against the "necessity" of the pact, but he asks for patience in order to include the response to "two critical elements" for the language: the Constitutional Court's ruling on 25% of Spanish is taught in Catalan classrooms –which is yet to be known– and the official status of Catalan in the European Union, despite the initiative remaining stalled. Sources from Junts add—as do the CUP—that the pact needs to specify what the Catalan government will do if the Constitutional Court rejects Catalan. A setback that pro-language organizations are already preparing for.

In fact, still within the education sector, this Monday USTEC—the largest union in the sector—announced that it will not sign the Language Pact either. Although they have not yet explained the reasons for this refusal, union sources assert that they consider it "very serious" that they have not been taken into account and insist that they are against the "content and form."

Puigdemont hasn't ruled out future involvement; on the contrary, he criticizes the fact that the PSC, ERC, and Comuns now want to sign it just because of the "newspaper headline" or because of "an attempt to expose the opposition because it supposedly isn't firm enough" in protecting the country's own language.

In fact, Puigdemont has questioned Salvador Illa's commitment to defending Catalan and, among other things, criticized him for not always using it as president of the Generalitat. In turn, the head of the Catalan government ignored the criticism coming from Waterloo and went out to defend the National Pact for the Language, although he regretted that Junts and the CUP "haven't wanted to be there." "It's a good pact with ambitious measures. [...] I would like them to be there, yes," the president admitted in an interview on The ideas cafe from TVE.

Esquerra has also defended this pact, and the party's spokesperson, Isaac Albert, has urged members of the Junta and the Cup (Couperos) to join in. "Language is too important for the country to have certain attitudes," he said in a press conference. In this sense, he defended it as an instrument to "better respond" to a possible setback by the Constitutional Court to Catalan in schools"The country wouldn't understand that in such a clear moment of threat to Catalan, we're not all on the same page. It's an instrument that adds, not subtracts, that provides solutions, not creates problems," Albert added. The Comuns (Communist Party) echoed this sentiment, arguing that all Catalanist parties should be involved because it's a broad agreement in defense of Catalan, "well-endowed economically" to increase its social use. And PSC spokesperson Lluïsa Moret argued that the National Pact for the Language is "a broad enough umbrella for everyone to feel comfortable," emphasizing that "if someone doesn't feel involved, it's their responsibility to explain it."

In any case, Carles Puigdemont has attacked Isla's government exactly one year after the last Catalan elections and accused it of being "a large, uncritical delegation of the Spanish government." "It's a government with a complex, one that hasn't bothered Madrid even once," Puigdemont criticized. On the contrary, he claimed to be the defender of the interests of the Catalan people and asserted that, despite being in the opposition, they want to "continue serving" the country, whether by increasing the minimum wage in Catalonia or "making sure that small and medium-sized Catalan businesses are heard" in the negotiations for shorter working hours.

"There is a convergence to screw Juntos"

The former president also ironically proclaimed the return of Convergència—his former party—but not precisely because he thinks Junts now embodies him in its political action. "Do you know where Convergència is? Screw Junts per Catalunya however and whenever possible," said the leader of the Catalan regional government. He asserted that he is now the target of all parties and finds himself in the middle of a "pincer" by the "ideological extremes."

At this point, he took a few jabs at the parties that equate the middle class with apartments on the coast with those who speculate in housing, but above all, he focused on attacking the "populist" proposals of the far-right Catalan Alliance. One of the main vote leaks that Junts has. He accused him of proposing "easy recipes for complex dishes" and insisted that, given the complexity of issues such as immigration and security, it is necessary to use "the scalpel, not the chainsaw."

Sources within Junts assure that they do not shy away from any debate and, therefore, are putting on the table reforms to toughen the law against repeated offenses, employment, and, among other things, to address the housing crisis. Junts wants to stop the loss of votes to Sílvia Orriols but wants to distance itself from what Aliança represents. That is why Puigdemont has argued that "what has made Catalanism greater is humanism" and not approaches "of a Catholicism more typical of [Antonio María] Rouco Varela and National Catholicism."