Regional leaders are key to finding a negotiated solution on Catalonia, be it to change the constitution to amend Spain’s territorial architecture — the subject of a Congress commission to be launched Wednesday — or to reach multilateral agreements on financing, which has long been a Catalan grievance.
Puigdemont and other Catalan leaders have repeatedly signaled their readiness to negotiate with Madrid on a new status within Spain; indeed, Puigdemont’s party — PDeCAT — only embraced secession after the central government rejected Catalan demands for a new financial settlement in 2012. [...]
Two senior officials in the two leading Catalan pro-independence parties said that if the secessionist camp fails to win more than 50 percent combined, they’ll need to rethink their strategy. They disagreed on whether they should seek a compromise with Madrid or focus on the long-term goal of independence if they fall short of a majority, which some polls currently forecast. [...]
Moreover, the only national party to endorse the right to self-determination and side with the Catalan demands for a referendum on secession, the far-left Podemos, has suffered a big drop in support in opinion polls in the past two months, coinciding with the Catalan conflict becoming the Spanish public’s second biggest concern after unemployment. [...]
On top of that, there’s the question of what extra powers should be given to the regions. According to the Regional Authority Index, an international database measuring the degree of decentralization for a number of countries, Spain is the second most decentralized country in the world, below Germany but above Belgium, the United States, Switzerland and Canada.
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