To convince Carles Puigdemont to head the list for the December 21, 2017 elections, the PDECat leadership agreed to withdraw at low tide and satisfy their desire to include independents. Thus the JxCat coalition took shape. Artur Mas, Marta Pascal and David Bonvehí understood that they could not dispense with the electoral claim of the “legitimate” president. The Democratic Party was doing well to distance itself from CiU’s suspected inheritance. Also to make up the image of the party at a time when the professional politician was still very stigmatized by the echoes of 15-M and the economic crisis. Puigdemont did not get the group of voters he wanted, but he did get a candidacy that was presented as the list of a movement, formed “by the people”.
These independents, most of them deputies for the first time on 21-D, today move in Junts per Catalunya (party) around Laura Borràs. No need to mention them. They are the names that sound the most to the reader due to their need to be present on the networks and in the media. A heterogeneous group with a profession prior to politics, who entered (idealism aside) to break their professional glass ceiling, to satisfy their desire for notoriety and because at that electrifying moment the line between the activism that many practiced and politics had been slimmed down. Entering “from above” they ensured representativeness without breaking any stone “from below”. The independents all want to vote for him and they want to be voted for because notoriety is their forte. Hence the constant need to maintain a more extreme discourse.
Junts, however, is not a new party. It is this group of independents adhering to a renamed structure, with a thread of continuity from the CDC, maintained by those who assumed that subsistence itself depended on the votes obtained by the Puigdemont brand. Those who did not bow to Caesarism and the free verses left by the management of 21-D left, under the PDECat acronym. The internal promotion of all these militants who maintain the party and who have positions thanks to it (as everywhere) does not want noise.
In the increasingly stable framework of the post-process, the machinery of those who are a party –represented by Jordi Turull– has been reactivated to gain more power. Hence the pressure so that the future candidates for the municipal elections – also in Barcelona – open up to agreements outside of the independence movement. It doesn’t matter that the Junts congress is peaceful in June, the tide is rising and it will leave less and less space for the independents. They will have to conform to the structure as more technical, more Pratian profiles can do, like that of Jaume Giró; leave politics or try their luck in a new formation.
4
