The Government and the Generalitat had never had such frequent contacts as since Pere Aragonès announced that he was freezing relations with the Executive of Pedro Sánchez. Minister Félix Bolaños will travel to Barcelona this Friday to meet with the Minister of the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà, in what will be the third meeting between the two since the Pegasus espionage scandal broke out in the middle of last April. The meeting will serve to definitively turn the page on the crisis and open a period of new rapprochement that will culminate in the meeting between presidents that both parties want to hold before the summer holidays.
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The meeting between number two of Sánchez and Aragonès will also be the prelude to the debate on General Policy, which will be held next week and which is marked in red on the Government’s calendar as it is one of the most important parliamentary appointments in this course. In that plenary session, the central Executive intends to emphasize a turn to the left and, not least, show that the investiture bloc remains united.
For these objectives, the collaboration of ERC will be necessary, a partner that may be essential for the votes that take place at the end of the debate on the State of the Nation but that in recent weeks has been less collaborative due to the pressure it has on Catalonia for espionage cases. However, Esquerra has taken good care to prevent the Government from losing significant votes and does not plan to make things difficult for it next week either.
From the Palau de la Generalitat they have been calling for a meeting between Sánchez and Aragonès for more than two months, which has not yet taken place. Faced with this refusal, the Government and Moncloa have opted for the links between the two to be seen in Barcelona, the same scenario in which they already met on April 24.
At that time the swords of the Government were high and Bolaños arrived at the Palau with the promise that he would commission an independent investigation by the Ombudsman, who ended up considering that there had been no bad practices in the CNI. The Goverrn branded as insufficient what was offered by the minister, who was asked to assume responsibilities at the highest level.
But this time the situation that Felix Bolaños will find will be very different from then. The person in charge of the CNI during the espionage scandal against pro-independence politicians, Paz Esteban, resigned on May 10, and now the Aragonès complaint is directed solely against Esteban herself and against the NSO company. From the political point of view, the Catalan Executive does not ask any member of the Government for political responsibilities either.
None of this is an obstacle for the Government to verbally maintain that the relationship between the two executives is still frozen, a formula with which ERC avoids pressure from Junts, which maintains that no more meetings should take place until the Pegasus issue is not solved.
But at the last meeting between Bolaños and Vilagrà, two weeks ago in Madrid, it was already clear that the Republicans had embarked on the road back to the bloc that supports the Government in Congress. Over the next few months they hope to get a new photograph of Sánchez with Aragonès, this time in Moncloa, in addition to, perhaps, agreements on the methodology of the dialogue table or even some agreement on Catalan. This last issue is also now hotter than ever, once the immersion is about to enter the jurisdiction of a Constitutional Court that, in turn, is waiting to be renewed and that could have a majority for the first time in decades. progressive.
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