The government of Catalonia gives no credibility to the latest proposal to emerge from Podemos about reaching an agreement to form a government and takes it as read that there will be new elections on 26-J. “They are just fireworks indicating that time is running out and that there is no party in the State that wishes to take on the raucous failure of Spanish politics, which not only shows an inability to come up with a political project for Catalonia, but also one for Spain,” said the Catalan presidency minister and government spokeswoman, Neus Munté.
Such is the case that the Catalan government spokeswoman insisted that this “inability of Spanish parties is due to different reasons, the main one of which is the Catalan issue, because in the different discussions between political parties Catalonia has been at the centre of the debate, and the possibility of a referendum is a red line for some parties.”
Asked about the Catalan government’s preference about how the independence bloc should approach the new elections, Munté made it clear that “the Catalan government wants the maximum unity of independence support, for everyone to follow a common road map, but obviously it is exclusively the decision of the political parties in how this unity is expressed,” she said. In fact, ERC has insisted in recent days that it does not want to reopen this debate, which in the opinion of the republicans “harms everyone.”
On the point that there has been no fully-functioning government in Madrid, Munté said that it has harmed people and social rights, “as for example those of refugees, of those people in vulnerable situations or those of the tertiary sector.” According to Munté, the government has sheltered behind it being an acting government in order “not to take important decision.”
On the other hand, Munté defended the fact that Oriol Junqueras should meet Soraya Sáez de Santamaría so close to new elections. “We are sceptics, above all 48 hours after the acting Spanish government challenged three laws from the Catalan parliament, but we think that as a government we need to go there, even if it is legitimate that CUP should ask us not to, they are different ways of understanding the situation.” Thus she responded to CUP, which had called on the Catalan administration not to attend the meeting. In Munté’s opinion, “it was agreed between Puigdemont and Rajoy, with the aim of dealing with everyday matters that until now the Rajoy government has ignored due to a lack of political will.”
