Junts official says Puigdemont and Sánchez will meet 

Junts general secretary Jordi Turull has said that Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez and former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont will meet "as required."

The pair will meet "to discuss the negotiation and deepen the resolution of the conflict," Turull said in an interview with Spanish public broadcaster RTVE.

Turull explained that there will be no mediator and that it will be a meeting, still without a date, between "two leaderships."

"What has been agreed is that there will be a meeting as required, for as long as necessary. It is about normalizing relations and a negotiation that has not been possible since 2017 as a result of repression," the Junts official added.

Shortly after Turull's announcement, Spanish government spokesperson and Education Minister Pilar Alegría said there was no meeting scheduled between Sánchez and Puigdemont.  

"I am not aware that this matter is on the agenda. This is what I can say at the moment," she said in an interview on Telecinco television channel.

Asked in Brussels on Thursday about a possible meeting with Puigdemont, Sánchez responded: "I look at my diary and what I've got there is a meeting with the Catalan president Pere Aragonès" on December 21.

Puigdemont and Sánchez came into contact yesterday in the European Parliament and questioned each other in public but did not meet.

"We want to negotiate properly between two nations," Turull said. "We set these conditions and we do not say that our priority is to save Spain from the far-right. We ran in the elections so that our votes would be useful in resolving the political conflict."

According to Turull, there was no meeting between Puigdemont and Sánchez yesterday because "what we are doing is not about photographs" but about resolving the territorial conflict between Catalonia and Spain.

The two met for the first time in six years in the European Parliament, where Sánchez took closed Spain's presidency of the Council of the European Union.