Salvador Illa categorically denies the referendum in the new electoral campaign in which Catalonia has once again immersed itself. But it is a demand that will be at the negotiating table for the governability of the Generalitat after the regional elections of May 12, and it is also a condition on which the future of the national legislature will depend.
Although the PSC denies the agreed consultation, ERC's mantra for weeks, however, in the conversations between the parties, several formulas have already been put on the table to satisfy the independence demand, and the target is, for example, the law organic of 1980 on regulation of the different modalities of referendum. «A possible solution is to reform it or make a new one»detail sources close to the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont.
Although Moncloa attributes the noise about the referendum to the competition between Junts and ERC, and denies that it is an option to be developed in the future to guarantee the stability of the Sánchez Government, the truth is that for months now the two partners, in competition , they work with experts and jurists in their orbit to have your consultation proposal ready if the socialist candidate intends to make a possible victory at the polls effective in an investiture.
The most recent history is there, and the PSC has already made several approaches to the consultation, referendum or whatever you want to call it, which ended up, it is true, correcting the national uproar and the division of the Catalan federation that these incursions caused. in the sovereigntist field – although always with important differences with respect to what Junts or ERC now defend.
The Catalan socialists embraced the right to decide between 2012 and 2015, and the Former Minister Iceta defended the Canadian route in 2016, as they remember, with all intentionality, from Puigdemont's entourage. These are positions that the PSC is now trying to erase from the newspaper library, coinciding with ERC's maneuver to try to get ahead of Junts with its agreed consultation proposal. But Puigdemont will also hit the campaign with this issue, and if he measures the times it is because “will give the strongest blow”as they maintain in their environment.
The independence movement remembers how the PSC embraced the right to decide between 2012 and 2015
Although Illa rejects the referendum for independence, and repeats it actively and passively, both Junts and ERC do not believe it. They still remember some of his statements from December 2022 in which he stated that “There will be no self-determination, but the Catalans will be consulted”. Those demonstrations already aroused misgivings in the socialist ranks, and those misgivings are still alive within the PSOE, where they agree with the sovereignists in quarantining Moncloa's denial that it will not agree to negotiate the consultation.
In fact, in this new discussion on the referendum, opened by the needs of parliamentary support to which Pedro Sánchez is subject, at the negotiation table Iceta's proposal even came to light that It was Congress who set the question and the minimum percentage of participation, For example. The referendum has been on the dialogue table since the last legislature, although the intensity of the debate has now been brought about by the strength that Puigdemont's deputies have in Congress.
From the independence movement they have pulled from the archives, and warn that we do not have to go that far to remember how the PSC in the 2012 elections, which Artur Mas called to launch itself towards the “procés”, and under the leadership of Pere Navarro, included in the electoral program their commitment to the right to decide through a referendum agreed within the framework of legality, more or less the Scottish route that Artur Mas also defended.
Then relations between the PSC and the PSOE became extremely strained, to the point that in 2013, in an exceptional gesture to date, the Catalan socialists voted differently than the PSOE in a CiU motion in favor of the right to decide. That PSOE has nothing to do with the one presided over by Pedro Sánchez, due to theoretical evolution, but, above all, due to pragmatic needs.
Those around Puigdemont remember that, although from 2015 onwards the PSC kept its sovereignist soul in a drawer, in 2016 Iceta defended the Canadian route as a last resort, if the constitutional reform that the socialists then advocated failed. The Parliament had approved a few months earlier the declaration of the beginning of the “procés” towards secession, which culminated on October 27, 2017.
The part of the PSC most accommodating with the idea of the consultation also remembers that according to what the CEO (the Catalan CIS) has said, a little more than 50 percent of PSC voters would somewhat or strongly agree with a referendum. Until now, the sovereignty discussion has always fractured the PSC: no one has forgotten the cost of including the right to decide in the 2014 European Games program.