Puigdemont in Madrid: sadly, there’s no “willingness to compromise in Spain"
He states that the push for independence "will not cease to exist". The president will not get up from the negotiating table "even if I’m there alone", and says that he would accept a referendum question not just on independence, although his patience “isn’t endless".
MadridCarles Puigdemont called for a negotiated solution to the Catalan process in Madrid on Friday. He did so first at a New Economy Forum breakfast at the Palace Hotel in the Spanish capital, and later at the opening session of the "Escolta Espanya, escucha Cataluña" (Listen up Spain, listen up Catalonia!) seminar of the Ortega-Marañón Foundation, which will last until July. Puigdemont stated that it's true that "dialogue is necessary, but so is courage", and that "you can't have dialogue based on comfort and pre-existing agreements". At the opening session of the seminar in which he introduced a lecture on Catalan history by the Hispanist John Elliot, Puigdemont lamented that the Catalan desire to find a negotiated solution "has never found a matching willingness to compromise in Spain”.
At the morning breakfast he said that "support for independence is here to stay" and, therefore, "we should not be afraid of dialogue, with a desire to reach agreements". "They expect us to back down and for the problem to go away", he reflected.
The president lamented that "the process doesn't worry the State". He admitted that perhaps it does worry the people, "but not their leaders", even though two million Catalans "have effectively given up on Spain". Despite everything, the Spanish state "does not worry, does not ask any questions or meet with us; nor does it take any measures to reverse the existing disaffection in Catalonia”.
Puigdemont explained that "the Catalan Statute was the last proposal", and attention is needed again "to find the best solution". The politics of doing nothing is "the fastest road to collapse", according to him. The president explained that he would like a dialogue on "how to work together", and that "the vast majority of Catalans do not wish to turn their back on Spain, but they do not approve of the current state of affairs, either”.
The Catalan president would like to see this new compromise —which he will seek without getting up from the table "even if I’m left there alone”— to end in an agreement on a referendum, he said, because the Catalan roadmap still includes two more votes: the constituent vote in just over one year, and a final referendum to ratify the constitution of the Republic prior to the proclamation of a Catalan state. Meanwhile, however, he is willing to compromise: “Let's agree on the consultation, the date, the question, and whether we can only ask about independence or also about a constitutional reform, as well as the quorum and the deadline to hold a new consultation", he added. He then made clear that the clock is ticking, and that time is running out on an agreement, "because patience is not endless”.
At the end of his first address, one of the breakfast attendees —with ties to far-right group VOX— approached the president to protest, cried out that "without the law there is no democracy!", and left some handcuffs and a copy of Spain’s Penal Code on the table. The organization apologized to the president. Also attending the breakfast was Ángel Gabilondo, PSOE spokesman for the Madrid assembly and Ministerial candidate for Pedro Sánchez, but no representative from the Spanish government attended. Others who did attend were Catalan Ministers Neus Munté and Meritxell Borràs, and the CDC parliamentary spokesmen in Spain’s Congress and the Catalan Parliament, Francesc Homs and Jordi Turull, respectively.
