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Ex-Catalan Leader Says Met With Second Vice President of Spain

MADRID (Sputnik) - Former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont said on Monday he and other ex-Catalan officials had met with Yolanda Diaz, the second vice president of Spain and the country's minister for work and social economy, in the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels to discuss various domestic policy matters.
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"The meeting we had this afternoon with [Yolanda_Diaz], [former member of the Catalan coalition bloc En Comu Podem Jaume Asens] and [former Catalan minister of the government of Catalonia Antoni Comin] is part of democratic normality in the European Union. Dialogue and maintaining political relations between formations of different ideologies should not be a surprise, nor an exception," Puigdemont wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Diaz, for her part, pledged to "continue looking for solutions through dialogue and democracy.
"Dialogue is a method and a compromise. To promote social advances and to move towards a multinational country where politics is the center of solutions," Diaz wrote on X.
Spanish media reported, citing government sources, that it had been the first public meeting between a member of the incumbent Spanish government and a leader of the Junts per Catalunya party, after Puigdemont co-organized the illegal independence referendum in the autonomous community of Catalonia in 2017 and then fled to Belgium to be elected for the European Parliament.
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Diaz reportedly participated in the talks on Monday as the leader of Spain's left-wing Sumar party, and not as the government's representative. The meeting was focused on the exchange of views on the current political situation in Spain, El Pais reported.
In late July, Spain held a general election, where People's Party (Partido Popular, PP) received the most votes — 137 seats out of 350 in the Spanish parliament. However, even with the support of the far-right VOX party, the number is still short of the 176 seats needed to form a government. Therefore, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), which gained 121 seats in the vote, might be able to form a leftist coalition government that, thereafter, with the Sumar and Catalan party allied, will reelect its leader Pedro Sanchez.
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