After an almost 150-minute meeting between PSOE and ERC's delegations there's no change of position with regards to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez and the latter party is maintaining its no. The outcome isn't a surprise, since both parties have embraced a long negotiation and the fact that they both have settled for separate statements to give public accounts of the meeting reveals that the path to travel is full of uncertainties.

PSOE's note speaks of "channeling the political conflict from dialogue and institutional understanding", an enormously ambiguous phrase which with the current PSOE can only be understood in a framework that doesn't even come close to the Pedralbes document. Very far from ERC's position, which includes a negotiating table based on four pillars: that it should be between governments, without preconceptions nor prohibited topics, with a timetable and with guarantees of compliance. The next meeting, next Tuesday.

The terrifying CIS survey published this Thursday which shows that 82% of Catalans don't trust Pedro Sánchez brings us back to the real world from the fantasy that anything can be agreed to avoid an alternative government or a third election. Everyone is warned of what is the rating of the acting prime minister among Catalan society. A little more than empty words will have to be expected from a politician not even trusted by his own voters.

Whilst the investiture gets on track or comes crashing down, Iñaki Undargarin will be able to spend Christmas with his family out of prison, having served a quarter of his sentence, which allows him 36 days' leave a year. The Catalan political prisoners, on the other hand, will be spending their second and third holiday seasons deprived of their freedom in Lledoners, Mas d'Enric and Puig de les Basses prisons by sentences which Europe will modify as unjust, punishing crimes which didn't take place.

Reality is sometimes enormously stubborn and those who need the votes will have to accept the complexity of the Catalan situation by necessity, a situation which they, with their mistakes, contributed to creating.