Catalan and Spanish presidents to meet next Wednesday

  • The Catalan president will ask that no obstacles be put in the way of the November 9th referendum

VilaWeb
VilaWeb
VilaWeb
Redacció
22.07.2014 - 12:58

La premsa lliure no la paga el govern, la paguen els lectors


Fes-te de VilaWeb, fem-nos lliures

A date has been announced for the upcoming meeting between the President of the Catalan Government, Artur Mas, and the president of the Spanish Government, Mariano Rajoy. It will be Wednesday of next week, July 30th, at the Moncloa, Rajoy’s official residence. At the meeting, Mas will want to talk to Rajoy about the November 9th referendum, and ask that it not be blocked. He has even declared his willingness to renegotiate the date and question of the referendum—with the approval of the other parties in favor of the right to decide. But the Spanish Government has already said that it will talk about everything except the referendum.

Rajoy’s No’s

The Spanish Government refused three times to negotiate the referendum last week alone. Rajoy said in Brussels that he would not participate in “absurd debates” and that “it wasn’t very serious” to want to negotiate the question. “The referendum is illegal and it will not be held,” he said, “not because the president of the Government says so, but because the courts and the Constitutional Court say so and because it is the Spanish People who have to decide what Spain is.”

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal last week, Spain’s Minister of Finance, Cristobal Montoro, rejected a “reinvention” of the State in order to assuage Catalan interests and ruled out a special fiscal framework for Catalonia. Spain’s vice president Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría closed the door to dialogue on the referendum during a press conference after the Ministers Council. According to her, Rajoy does not have the “capacity to negotiate” the sovereignty referendum, nor does he control the sovereignty of all of the Spanish People in order to “authorize what the courts and the Constitutional Court consider cannot be done within the current framework”.

Recomanem

La premsa lliure no la paga el govern. La paguem els lectors.

Fes-te de VilaWeb, fem-nos lliures.

Fer-me'n subscriptor
des de 75€ l'any