There were no last-minute surprises at the Junts per Catalunya management meeting. Yesterday, the formation proposed deputy Anna Erra as a candidate to preside over the Parliament and relieve Laura Borrà s, already former president of the Chamber, in the position of higher institutional rank under the responsibility of the post-convergence organization, the second authority in Catalonia.
If there is no surprise and no unforeseen change of script, on Friday Erra will be elected president of the institution by the plenum in an ad hoc plenum with the votes in favor of the Junts and Esquerra Republicana groups, and with the abstention of the CUP, who already opted for this option in the Borràs vote in March 2021.
Therefore, this week will put an end to an interim situation in Parliament that started at the end of July last year, when the president of JxCat was suspended for her judicial process under article 25.4 of the regulation of the Chamber. Then there were voices from the formation she leads who asked her to step aside, but Borràs has remained in limbo and in an unprecedented situation for ten months, until the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia condemned her and the The Central Electoral Board ruled that the seat should be removed from him, a decision that was implemented by the Bureau of Parliament last week.
Erra, still acting mayor of Vic, entered the crosshairs to replace Borràs a year ago, after announcing that she would not aspire to a new mandate in the capital of Osona, a traditional converging feud, and obtaining more votes than the president of the party at the congress that Junts held in Algiers, in which the leadership was renewed. It was the second that got the most support, only behind the general secretary, Jordi Turull. In all this time she has been the preferred candidate for the more pragmatic wing of the formation, which bet on placing Erra as president of the Chamber from the first moment, when it was already planned that Borràs would be suspended as deputy by the their legal status.
At the meeting of the Junts executive, which took place yesterday afternoon at the party’s headquarters, Erra arrived with Borrà s, in a sought-after image that was not the result of chance, although in the previous weeks the president of the formation had avoided showing her public support for who will be her replacement in the presidency of the Parliament.
In fact, Borrà s was the one who took the floor yesterday on behalf of Junts when the management meeting concluded, and justified the fact that she has been suspended president of the Chamber all this time. “I chose not to resign in order not to normalize injustice, in order not to send the message that repression achieves what it seeks”, assured Borrà s, who again proclaimed that his legal case is a case of lawfare. In addition, he assigned duties to Erra and once again asked for the deletion of article 25.4 of the Parliament’s rules of procedure, which dictates the suspension of deputies to whom an oral trial is opened for crimes related to corruption, and that work be done in a separate Catalan electoral law so that there is a Catalan electoral union and that the Central Electoral Board is not the administrative body that decides on the members of Parliament.
In this way, on Friday, for the first time since the restoration of Parliament in 1980, there will be a plenum to replace a president of the institution in the middle of the legislature. All of Borrà s’ predecessors had been at the head of the Chamber until the end of the legislature.
