The head of the Juntas, Carles Puigdemont, recalled this Wednesday, from Waterloo (Belgium), that the Government of Pedro Sánchez He does not have a majority in Congress and it is in his hands. A similar situation to the one they have Salvador Illa (PSC) and Jaume Collboni (PSC), in the Generalitat of Catalonia and the City Council of Barcelona, respectively, although they maintain pacts with ERC and the municipalities, signed or not, which allow them a certain tranquility and greater stability. Puigdemont defined the situation as a “monopoly of institutions”, all in the hands of the socialists.
But the former regional president, in his speech open to the press during the working days of the Junts parliamentary group of which he is part, told the deputies and warned Sánchez that Junts would use all the “resources” at its disposal to go “to the offensive.” “We have to know how to take advantage of the opportunity we have in Madrid [en el Congreso] for the benefit of all Catalans”, he declared. He then adds that the demands of Junts in the Lower House will be maintained, whether the PSOE or the PP governs and whether Junts is in the Generalitat or in the opposition . “Being useful is our reason for being” was installed.
One way of “being useful” understood by the leader of Junts, for example, is the role played by the deputies of this formation in Parliament and the leaders and activists of the party on August 8, when Puigdemont presented himself to the center of Barcelona. gave a short speech and fled Spain to return to Belgium, without the Mossos d’Esquadra and the National Police or Civil Guard being able to arrest him. The former regional president thanked them for their help. “You played the role, the role that was expected of all of you. Thanks to you, the operation was a historic success”, said, and whose words were greeted with applause.
In this sense, Puigdemont used a good part of the twenty minutes of his speech to criticize Illa and the new government. “He blah blah blah normalization “It’s a lie because this meeting, if it was normal, we should have held it somewhere in the south of Catalonia,” said the leader of Junts and escaped from Spanish justice, in direct reference to the fact that the amnesty law does not apply to his particular case. According to him, “the ballot boxes [tras la cita electoral de mayo] to leave a fragile government, a government that is holding on thanks to an investiture pact that even those who signed it do not believe in,” especially referring to the CPS and the ERC. Junts must therefore be “the alternative”, the only possible one, he added.
Following this argument, Puigdemont insisted on accusing the PSC and the Illa of wanting to “denationalize” Catalonia, and declared that this idea was camouflaged by the socialists under the term “normalization”. To this end, he recalled that the President of the Generalitat went to the protests of Catalan civil society in 2017, reject the “process” at the moment of its greatest tension, in October, and defend the Constitution in Catalonia. He joined, he said, with “the right and the extreme right” by demonstrating “against the interests of the majority of Catalans”.
For Puigdemont, “the matrix of Catalan civil society is notorious” in the Illa government and he regretted that the “president” did not devote, yesterday, October 1, “not a minute” of his agenda to the memory of the celebration of the illegal referendum for independence of 2017, but it was seen with Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida, former leader of the Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC), “a party that has already disappeared”. He also criticized the king’s “inappropriate speech” of October 3, 2017, a message to all Spaniards with which Felipe VI spoke in favor of legality and constitutional order.
On the other hand, the intervention of Puigdemont This has not clarified the role that must be played within the Junts parliamentary group in Barcelona. The former regional president ran in the May 12 elections, assuring that they would be the last and that if he was not elected president of the Generalitat, he would leave the political front. But even if he failed to be re-elected, he did not give up the role of regional deputy. Even his group did not choose the leader of the opposition, an institutionalized position to which Junts is entitled since it is the first group in Parliament without being part of the government.
