SPAIN’s foreign minister has spoken out about its government’s “anomalous” position where the acting Unionist prime minister is having to depend on a pro-independence party to support his investiture.

Josep Borrell’s remarks came as discussions between Socialist party leader Pedro Sanchez and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) failed to find a way forward for him to take office.

ERC’s leader Oriol Junqueras has been in prison for more than two years and is now serving a 13-year sentence for sedition.

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Party bosses had sought negotiations about Catalonia’s future and, in particular, self-determination, which Sanchez has consistently rejected. Borrell said parliamentary arithmetic demanded that one party abstain.

“If you do not want to repeat the elections, you have to invest a government and that is why someone needs to be absent, if the [right-wing People’s Party] PP does not want to do it, it will be necessary to see if another does,” he said.

His comments came after Roger Torrent, Speaker of the Catalan Parliament after meeting his Scottish counterpart in Edinburgh, held up the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 as an example from which Spain could learn.

Following his meeting with Presiding officer Ken Macintosh, Torrent said Spain should show “less eagerness in silencing institutions and the voice of the public and more courage in finding a democratic solution to the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain”.

He added: “The democratic chambers of mature democracies do not understand what is happening in our country.”

The criminal convictions against the Catalan independence leaders were condemned in Holyrood last week by SNP MSP Ruth Maguire, who raised Amnesty International’s call for the immediate release of the politicians.

“Amnesty argue that an overly broad interpretation of the crime of sedition has resulted in criminalising legitimate acts of protest, violating the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” she said. “I agree with them. Organising peaceful meetings to support the independence of Catalonia is not a crime.”