Conspiracy theory added to Cataluña amnesty mix

SPAIN’S two principal constitutionalist parties, the Partido Popular and PSOE, both want to head the next national government.

They know that Cataluña’s separatist parties, and Junts per Catalunya in particular, can tip the balance towards one or the other.

Junts’ seven votes at the conclusion of an investiture debate could, should Junts so wish, put either Alberto Nuñez Feijoo or Pedro Sanchez in the Moncloa Palace.

Consequently Cataluña’s regional PP is unhappy at the very thought of the party hierarchy in Madrid talking to Junts.

The PP has vowed not to negotiate with the party, even though Daniel Sirera, a PP councillor at Barcelona city hall, admitted to contacts with Junts councillors.

Neither are matters any easier for the PSOE.  Veteran socialist politicians, PSOE voters and potential PSOE voters are unhappy at the very thought of the party hierarchy in Madrid discussing an amnesty with Junts.

All it needed was a conspiracy theory and Junts politician Xavier Trias did not disappoint. He has now provided one by maintaining that the PSOE was behind the failed coup d’état of February 1981.

The socialists wanted a military intervention that would later allow it to recentralise Spain, when the autonomies were beginning to take shape, Trias declared.

He originally belonged to the centre-right Convergencia i Unio party (CiU) which, following a roundabout and tortuous route, has finally engendered Junts.

Trias was Barcelona’s CiU mayor between July 2011 and June 2015 and is justifiably cheesed off with the PSOE, as he would again be Barcelona mayor had the PSOE, Comunes and the PP (yes! the PP!) not joined forces to keep Junts out of city hall after the May 28th municipal elections.

Conspiracy theories regarding the attempted coup of February 1981 do the rounds periodically, and it is true that a prominent PSOE MP, Enrique Mugica, lunched in the company of several other people with General Alfonso Armada in Lerida in October 1980.

During the course of the meal, the possibility was discussed of a hypothetical UCD-PSOE coalition government headed by an “independent.” In retrospect it is obvious that this would have been  Armada.

“Nobody could ever believe this was Señor Tejero’s coup d’état,” Trias told a SER radio interviewer, although few believed at the time – and even fewer later – that Tejero was solely in charge of the unsuccessful February 1981 uprising.

“There could possibly be some innocents who believe it,” Trias said, as he drove home his PSOE conspiracy theory.  “They’re going to tell me that I’m gaga, that I’m old, but it’s obvious.”

At 77, Trias is hardly in his dotage, but not many would contradict the ga-ga self-diagnosis.