“Puigdemont is from Junts, but Junts is no longer Puigdemont’s party.” The former president leaves the bridge of a formation he has led without connecting to a single management meeting or a single national council. On which he plans his moral authority but in which he has never exercised organic authority. He did not want to enter the Government of Pere Aragonès, he opposed the pact with the PSC in the Diputació de Barcelona, Laura Borràs was not his candidate for the Generalitat … puigdemontism with the former president pending European court rulings on his political and personal future.
In the executive distributed 50%, “everyone is from Puigdemont” but there is only one name from the group of faithful who locked themselves up in a hotel for three days to put together the list for 21-D -Josep Rius-; and three members of the command that settled in a loft on Calle Jesús in Barcelona for the great electoral comeback: Rius, Aleix Sarri and Gemma Geis. Puigdemont’s ABCR has been dismantled with the casualties of Elsa Artadi and the step back of Albert Batet, who is left out of an executive position – a marginal parliamentary position – for the first time since Convergència lowered the blind in July 2016. “In two weeks many things have died ”, they confess in the environment of the former president. The distance comes from afar, in the guestbook of the house in Waterloo there is a lot of Consell per la República and little Junts.
The least convergent of the convergent, he imagined Junts as a horizontal party, with its structure in the cloud and without the need for organic anchors. Puigdemontism was in the environment and acronyms, and inheritances were a burden. The figure of Puigdemont crossed the CDC world… but after the high of the electoral campaigns comes reality and material needs. Caring for prisoners, infrastructure in Brussels, maintaining structure in the territory, politically surviving the presidency of Quim Torra, the pandemic… political families broken by the procés and starting over with the elections.
The puigdemontismo was anchored to the discourse of the confrontation while ERC turned with the siren songs of the polls. Not only because of the number of seats, but also because of those that indicate that the electorate’s problems go through housing, employment and the economy… The polls smiled at ERC and a gap was opened in Junts. “We have to manage and show that we do it better than ERC” was the slogan in some post-convergence offices a year ago. If the path was obvious and majority, the Borràs-Turull distribution of the new executive officially puts it at 50%. The president of the Parliament “has won” the image battle, but what about politics?
The CDR-Palau has installed itself in the post-convergence executive and Borràs has found a winter refuge in anticipation of foreseeable disqualifications, but on the command bridge there is more than one plan about what Junts should be. It remains to be seen if they are compatible. While the president of the Parliament reigns among the militant-twitterers, Turull knows that governing forces us to assume contradictions and therein lies the challenge of the future general secretary –with David Saldoni as a shadow deputy–: to prevent the gap between the speeches and the voter mean of Junts is increasing.
The gap widens when a consultation is announced to the militancy on the government pact with ERC without waiting for the “audit” that Rius and Victòria Alsina are preparing and that should serve as the basis for one of the presentations of the second part of the Junts congress . Also when the Catalanist agreement on language policy is broken without an alternative guarantee solution to preserve the immersion model of judicial challenges. The “disobedience with consensus” is a decision that is attributed to the new set of balances in Junts, although the protagonists are the same ones that gave their approval to the proposal signed with ERC, PSC and the commons two months ago.
In two weeks the end of the original Puigdemontismo has been certified and in two days the reliability of Junts as a political ally has been questioned. The supposed 50% of Junts who think that breaking with the ERC and going to elections –with Borràs as a candidate?– is an opportunity, should carefully read tomorrow’s survey in La Vanguardia… Meanwhile, Aragonès takes advantage of the Catalangate wave and will meet in Brussels… with Puigdemont.
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