Marta Rovira has spoken little in public since her return to Catalonia on July 12 thanks to the amnesty law and the tsunami issue. During these months, he dedicated himself to steering the ERC ship in the last miles before the change of command, practically alone. But this Monday, when the party congress was already convened, Rovira gathered the media to say goodbye and look back on his 13 years of mandate as general secretary of the ERC.
In a farewell where the sentimental did not eclipse the political, Rovira left deep criticisms both against the leader of Junts, Carles Puigdemont, and against his partner at the head of ERC for more than a decade, Oriol Junqueras. The leader defended that the 2017 leadership must be renewed.
“Is there really anyone left who believes that those of us responsible for 1-O will be able to fix this problem? That’s why I’m leaving too: because we haven’t known how to end the referendum for seven years,” declared the outgoing leader of the Republicans.
As noted, the pro-independence parties arrived on October 1, 2017 with a complicated internal and external balance and, after voting day, “no decision was made.” “There was no agreement on what we should do on October 2,” Rovira summarized.
However, the Secretary General indicated that the day of October 1 was “a success”, but that not knowing how to “finish it together was a mistake”. It is for this reason, he continued, that he notes today with disgust that all that seems to have remained of that day is a battle between the parties to know the authorship. “We must end this sterile competition, we need new leadership,” he added.
The general secretary said that, despite everything that happened during the process, the last months have been the hardest of her mandate, due to the “distrust” that has taken root in the party. Rovira spoke of “errors” regarding the controversial posters which insulted the Maragall brothers and which came from the ranks of the party itself.
He also had very harsh words towards Junqueras when, without quoting him, he assured that there were “those who, in their personal interest, sowed distrust within the party to gain an advantage in the internal race”.
A stick that redoubled when he threw his former teammate in the direction: “There are those who believe that the worst will be the best for him. And I believe that the worse it gets, the worse it gets, especially for the political project.”
Defense of negotiation with the PSOE
Marta Rovira read a sort of “management report” for more than an hour, but instead of in front of the ERC authorities, she did it in front of the public. One of the points that Rovira insisted on the most is that of providing details on the negotiation phase between the ERC and the PSOE, which began at the end of 2018.
The one who led most of these negotiations from Geneva forcefully defended the need to go through stages highly criticized in Catalonia, such as that of pardons, to achieve higher objectives.
“We did not want a pardon and our priority was not to reform the Penal Code either,” he explained. “But we had to go through here to finally get an amnesty. “We knew there was water in the pool,” he said.
Rovira described the negotiations with the PSOE as a stage of great learning for the party, while defending “progressivism” in politics.
This is why he stressed that the ERC, despite the poor electoral results and having disappeared from the leadership of the majority of major Catalan institutions, is immersed in a second phase of negotiations with the government in which a referendum can even be obtained in Catalonia. , he declared.
