The parliamentary elections on May 12 will be a turning point for former president Carles Puigdemont, whatever the outcome of the polls. The Junts leader committed yesterday to his return to Catalonia, to the Parliament, for the investiture debate, whether he is the candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat or not. The elections will also determine his political future. If he is not elected president, he will leave his seat and “active politics”, as he revealed yesterday, when he also announced that he will not act as head of the opposition under any circumstances.
The progress in the Catalan elections has disrupted the plans of the former president, who expected his return in the autumn. With the autonomous elections on the near horizon, he has changed his initial idea and advanced his comeback, which has as an additional ingredient and backdrop the Amnesty law that will be validated by Congress definitively at the end of May, according to the script current, and the confidence of the Catalan ex-president that he will leave without effect at least the precautionary measures such as the arrest warrants he has on him and other sovereignist leaders. In this context, he stated that the summons from the Supreme Court for the Democratic Tsunami protests of October 2019 will remain on “wet paper”. “It doesn’t bother me more than the rest of the accusations of the last six and a half years”, said the leader about this case, in which he is charged with a crime of terrorism.
Likewise, the fellow JxCat candidate made it clear in an interview with RAC1 that he will not return in the middle of the electoral campaign even if the approval of the amnesty allows it. “I will return to Catalonia on the day of the investiture debate. It is an act more of a country than a party, outside of an electoral context and with an institutional meaning”, he pointed out after recalling that he left in 2017 as president deposed by article 155 of the Constitution. The comeback, therefore, “cannot be an act at the service of an electoral strategy”, as Junts candidate in the Catalan dispute, he added later.
In the area of ??hypotheses and speculation about the results, about the possibility of JxCat winning and the PSC making a maneuver like that of the Barcelona City Council adding the support of the PP or Vox, Puigdemont ventured that “the PSC he will know what he has to do” when the case came, so he sent a warning about the stability of the central government to the Lower House.
“What they did in Barcelona is legitimate, but it has a point of betrayal, they told us something else hours before and this now has consequences, the city has no budget”, Puigdemont pointed out. “If they do it, they will already do it. It would make very little sense for us to support the central government if its franchise in Catalonia tries to put sticks in the wheels of the will of the Catalans”, he predicted later, implying that they would not support the PSOE in Congress in this scenario, even though which did not clarify whether this will mean the end of the legislature.
In any case, the post-convergent leader remarked that they will not negotiate with the PSC. “They will do it, with their responsibility”, retorted the former president, who assured that he only wants to have a majority if he is pro-independence. “I will not seek an agreement with the PSC and I do not think that the PSC will seek one with me. There is no tripartite possible with us… another thing is that we agree piece by piece and we want to talk to everyone, but the parliamentary majority must be based on a clearly pro-independence project”, he concluded.
From these words, although they were not said, it follows that JxCat expects the PSC to abstain if there is an agreement and the sum of Junts and Esquerra is close to the absolute majority, as has happened in recent legislatures. A different scenario would be that of a tripartite of socialists, republicans and commoners. On this, Junts has nothing to object to.
In relation to the electoral debates, which Junts has asked to be held in the south of France so that Puigdemont can participate, the former president recalled that he is meeting with the PSOE in Switzerland. “Can’t the PSC come to Perpignan?”, he questioned before referring to the face-to-face that Pere Aragonès asked him. “Normally the president of the Generalitat is proposed face to face, he does not propose them”, said the former president, who did come to debate with Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
