Pedro Sánchez’s monologue

The Span­ish prime min­is­ter, Pedro Sánchez, was in Barcelona again yes­ter­day in his role as leader of the PSOE party to give his sup­port to the PSC can­di­date for mayor of the city, Jaume Coll­boni, at an event in the Cen­tre de Con­ven­cions be­fore an au­di­ence of 2,000 peo­ple, ac­cord­ing to the or­gan­is­ers. Al­though the sub­ject of his speech was ex­pected given that the day be­fore the cab­i­net had ap­proved the bud­get plans that in­clude a sig­nif­i­cant spend­ing pack­age for Cat­alo­nia, Sànchez made lit­tle al­lu­sion to it. The prime min­is­ter lim­ited him­self to call­ing on the PDe­CAT and ERC par­ties to sup­port “a trans­for­ma­tion pro­ject for the next 20 years,” and bar the way for the right-wing PP, C’s and VOX par­ties. Sánchez put for­ward his own plans, based on the val­ues of “tol­er­ance, re­spect, equal­ity, jus­tice and free­dom,” as the best way to stop the drift to the right.

Apart from PDe­CAT and ERC, Sánchez also had a mes­sage for pres­i­dent, Quim Torra, who at the end of his speech he called on to “gov­ern” and “solve” the real prob­lems af­fect­ing the pub­lic. “We ask him to go from mono­logue to di­a­logue,” he said, adding that the many elec­tions in Cat­alo­nia al­ways pro­duce the same re­sult: “the pro-in­de­pen­dence camp does not have a so­cial ma­jor­ity in Cat­alo­nia.” Sánchez called for over­com­ing “the bloc men­tal­ity” and “re­cov­er­ing and sup­port­ing co­ex­is­tence,” which he be­lieves has been bro­ken due to the in­de­pen­dence process.

In­sist­ing that it is a sit­u­a­tion that can­not be re­solved in just a mat­ter of months, Sánchez said di­a­logue was the only way for­ward, but with­out in­clud­ing any of the de­mands the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment has pro­posed to him, which are based on two basic as­pects: the im­pris­on­ment and exile of mem­bers of the for­mer Cata­lan gov­ern­ment, and a vote on self-de­ter­mi­na­tion.