The strategies of the Process until today

Once the amnesty is fully applied, the Procés can be read from the perspective of political conflict negotiation strategies. In the following text, nearly forty different strategies are identified along with their corresponding actions. Some were clear successes and others, evident mistakes, on both sides. Between 2015 and 2019, the independence movement and the State clashed head-on, and almost all the tools they used were based on pressure and zero-sum outcomes. The sovereignty movement turned the 2015 regional elections into plebiscitary elections and presented that moment as a unique and unrepeatable historical exception. It relied on massive social mobilization, on civil disobedience regarding the disconnection laws and the 1-O, and on a poorly calculated escalation. With the DUI, it tried to manufacture a point of no return that did not actually exist. This was one of the major mistakes: expectations were generated that could not be met. The State, for its part, delegitimized the Government as an interlocutor and invoked the doctrine of non-interference to shut out any external mediation. During the 1-O, the police acted without any agreed-upon de-escalation protocol, and later the State applied Article 155 along with criminal judicialization, in a metered scale of repression. Furthermore, it deliberately worsened the independence movement's no-agreement alternative with the pressure of economic interdependence (the departure of companies) and international isolation. The exile responded with strategic internationalization, paradiplomacy, and recourse to European bodies, and the European arrest warrants were the battlefield for this. Both sides fell into the hostile attribution bias and turned the emotional dimension into a battlefield. In the pro-independence camp, the inability to build a unified coalition platform ended up breaking ERC, Junts, and the CUP. In the State's camp, the great structural spoiler (the element that ruins everything) was the absence of a state pact with the PP.

Since 2018, and especially since 2021, the conflict moved from the streets to the institutional path, and parliamentary arithmetic was the decisive lever. The Spanish government applied grace measures gradually: pardons, penal reform regarding sedition and embezzlement, and the amnesty law. Each step functioned as a gesture of progressive trust and as a guarantee of a dignified exit, with technical euphemisms such as "aggravated public disorder" or "normalization." There was a double table of legitimacy: the dialogue table with ERC was the formal one, and the discreet channel with Junts in Switzerland, with an international mediator and much diplomacy of silence, was the real one. Recourse was also made to constructive ambiguity regarding the "political conflict" and "national recognition," and to thematic compartmentalization, which separated the amnesty from the referendum. The agenda was broadened with singular financing, the forgiveness of the FLA, Rodalies, and Catalan in the EU, so that there were more things to distribute. With Illa, the climate de-escalated: conflicting symbols were frozen and language was disarmed. Each side was able to present the amnesty as its own victory, and this is one of the great successes of the period. Nevertheless, the process has been fragile. Junts broke with the PSOE in 2025 with a threat to abandon the table. Furthermore, the Supreme Court's resistance to amnesty for embezzlement showed that the judiciary could act as a spoiler and that what had been agreed upon was easily reversible. The Constitutional Court's endorsement in October 2026 closes this path and makes personal guarantees and the return of the exiles effective. Almost everything that would give stability to the agreement is still pending: a prior pact on the rules of the game, a statutory or constitutional reform agreed upon with democratic validation, transversal pacts that protect it from a change of government, guarantee and verification mechanisms, and policies of memory and reparation. In short, people have been de-judicialized, but the underlying conflict remains open.