I rated it as "game of impotence"(NOW, July 17, 2025) the agreement between ERC and the PSC for the investiture of Salvador Illa. I said this in light of the five pages presented by the Bilateral Commission between the government of the Generalitat and the general administration of the State that sought to develop - in fact, diluted - the four pages of the initial agreement." issues that the PSC could not decide and the fact that ERC had no better alternative - for the party - than to let the PSC govern. Two impotences were added with an agreement with a more than improbable result: Pedro Sánchez and the PSOE, and for which Junts also had no alternative to agree with anyone else. Only Sánchez's government has not had the full implementation of the amnesty in its hands—apart from 150 activists, and particularly the exiled Comín, Puig, and Puigdemont—but it has not succeeded in making Catalan an official language in Europe, nor in transferring full powers over immigration to Catalonia, or in making progress on such significant issues as making public the fiscal balances or budget execution figures, which did depend on it. And on the underlying issue, the Swiss roundtable as an intermediary for the resolution of the political conflict—economic agreement and referendum, among others—has been reduced to President Isla, Sánch's right-hand man.
If any evidence of this mutual impotence of all against all is needed, it is the high probability that neither the Catalan nor the Spanish governments will have budgets for 2026 and will have to extend the 2023 budget again. The problem for Junts is that from being seen as supporting the "most progressive government in history," it will be presented as an obstacle to governability. Junts has no chance of betting on the reactionary, Spanish-speaking alternative of the PP and Vox, and can only count on the ability to force, through exhaustion, a very difficult early election with an uncertain outcome for themselves. Needless to say, the defenders of stability and the forces of order—of economic stability and media order—will be held accountable. Junts' decision creates political instability there, but above all, it hinders the "peace autonomous" (NOW, March 20, 2025) here. It's too early to say, but not too early to guess.
However, from my point of view, the real challenge The problem with Junts is that, while they offer a notable speech as an independentist opposition in Spain—just as President Carles Puigdemont's speech last Monday was also solidly argued—they are unable to explain how they intend to break out of the autonomist impasse—and lead us all out of it. And as long as they don't have a consistent and plausible political strategy to offer the independence movement in the medium and long term, their adversaries will insist on shifting their public profile to the right, obscuring the social democratic roots they ideologically represent. As we have seen recently, they will continue to be presented as subservient to the obsessions of the Catalan Alliance for electoral reasons, rather than committed to democratically resolving the ills that are fueling the xenophobic right. This type of disqualification strikes me as absurd, and I don't know if it's detrimental to Junts, but it certainly benefits the Catalan Alliance. But I now understand that in the struggle to draw ideological maps, which is also politics, Junts's lack of strategic clarity makes these tactical deceits very easy. Perhaps the agreement should have been broken, but we still need to explain how to go about it.
