Spanish and Catalan leaders agree to resume territorial talks

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has agreed with president of the Catalonia region Pere Aragonès on resuming later this month negotiations aimed at reaching a solution to the country’s territorial conflict.

Mr Sánchez and Mr Aragonès held a highly anticipated meeting in Madrid on Friday, their first for 10 months. It followed a recent spying scandal that had rocked their relationship and threatened to derail the legislature.

Spanish government spokeswoman Isabel Rodríguez said the meeting had ensured “normalisation” of the relationship between Madrid and the Catalan government. She also said the two leaders had agreed that talks between their administrations on the future of Catalonia will continue in the last week of July.

The so-called “dialogue table” was agreed on when Mr Sánchez’s coalition government took office in early 2020. However, the pandemic, the electoral calendar and, Catalan nationalists claim, the Spanish government’s reluctance to engage, have meant that it has made little progress. The last time it convened was in September 2021.

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“Today there has been a ratified commitment to progress with dialogue,” Mr Aragonès said. However, he contradicted the Spanish government’s claims of “normalisation” of the relationship.

“From now on, if there are advances in terms of concrete deals which allow us to resolve the [Catalan] conflict in areas such as repression or the refusal to allow Catalonia to decide its own future, then the relationship will be able to be normalised — right now it isn’t,” he said.

Mr Aragonès has called for judicial action against Catalan politicians to be stopped. He also wants Madrid to agree to a binding referendum on independence for the region.

The minority government of Mr Sánchez, a Socialist, requires the parliamentary support of Mr Aragonès’s Catalan Republican Left (ERC).

More transparency

However, revelations in the spring that the CNI intelligence service had carried out surveillance on Mr Aragonès threatened to undermine their fragile alliance. Although the government replaced the head of the CNI, the Catalan government has demanded more transparency regarding the case.

Mr Aragonès said he welcomed “the commitment of non-repetition of these events by [Mr] Sánchez as well as his commitment to collaborate with justice to clarify the facts”.

The leader of the opposition conservative Popular Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, described the Catalan government’s demands related to the negotiating table as “blackmail”.

“The government depends more than ever on ERC for practically everything,” he said.

Friday’s meeting took place the day after European Union advocate general Richard de la Tour opened the door to possible extradition from Belgium of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont so that he can face trial in Spain. A court decision on the case will be taken later in the year.