BARCELONA, Nov 26 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The biggest separatist party in Spain’s Catalonia region has voted to support a new Spanish government in return for talks on independence.
About 95% of members of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), a social democratic party, backed the move in a ballot.
The ERC could now become kingmaker to the Socialists who failed to win a majority in this month’s election.
The Socialists are building a coalition with anti-capitalist party Podemos.
But their combined tally of seats, 155, is still short of the 176 required to form a parliamentary majority.
With the ERC’s 13 seats and a possible combination of support from other leftist or Basque parties, acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez could continue in office at the head of a coalition.
However, his Socialists have firmly opposed granting Catalans a legal independence referendum, while recognising that both Catalonia and the Basque Country are nations within Spain, and not just regions.
The Republican Left of Catalonia (as their name translates from Catalan) is the region’s oldest separatist party.
Its president, Oriol Junqueras, is one of the separatist leaders jailed by Spain in October for sedition, over their part in the illegal independence referendum of 2017.
In Catalonia, the ERC won three seats more than its centre-right separatist rival, Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), the party of former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont.
In the party ballot, members were asked to vote on whether they agreed to “reject Pedro Sánchez’s investiture unless there is previously an agreement to tackle the political conflict with the state at a negotiating table”.
It has a list of conditions for reaching an agreement which include holding talks without limits, including talks on an independence vote and an amnesty for the jailed leaders. — NNN-AGENCIES