One year after the name of Anna Erra (Vic, 1965) began to sound in the gossip of Junts per Catalunya to relieve Laura Borràs as president of the Parliament before her foreseeable suspension as deputy, the management has proposed the leader as a candidate to put an end to a little more than ten months of interim in the Catalan Chamber. On Friday she will be elected by the plenary session with the votes in favor of JxCat and Esquerra Republicana; and with the abstention of the CUP, which already opted for that option with Borràs in March 2021.
Erra entered the pools after announcing that he would not aspire to a new mandate in the capital of Osona, a convergent traditional stronghold, and obtaining more votes than Borràs in the congress that Junts held in Argelers, in which the party leadership was renewed . She was the second to garner the most support, only behind the general secretary, Jordi Turull. In all this time she has been the preferred candidate for the most pragmatic wing of the formation.
Still acting mayor of Vic, Erra became a deputy in June 2018, after there were resignations in the Junts per Catalunya group, then a coalition of Convergència Democrà tica de Catalunya and PDECat with several independents, for the formation of the Government of Quim Torra. She entered due to the resignation of Isabel Ferrer, who had been appointed general director of Civil Protection.
She was also the first president of the Junts national council – a position now held by Josep Rull – for a short period, as well as being vice president of the party. He entered municipal politics in the governments of Convergència and Union in the capital of Osona, with Josep Maria Vila d’Abadal – founder of the Association of Municipalities for Independence (AMI) – as mayor in 2007. In 2015 he was the convergent candidate and in his first mandate he agreed with the PSC. In 2019 he obtained an absolute majority. Before occupying the mayor’s office, she had been a councilor for Education, Culture, Commerce and Tourism and in charge of the municipality’s social area.
In February 2020, just before the pandemic, he had raised some controversy due to statements in a plenary session of Parliament, when he asked, within the framework of the Generalitat’s No em canviïs de llengua campaign, that “autochthonous Catalans” will not speak in Spanish to those people who by their appearance do not seem Catalan, but immediately apologized after criticism from the opposition.
The next president of the Parliament has a degree in Geography and History from the University of Barcelona and a diploma in Teaching from the University of Vic and has worked as a teacher in her town for more than 20 years before taking the step to institutional politics. The fact that she was the second leader in support in the last conclave was a surprise, since she Erra usually has a low-key profile. In fact, when Junts was debating whether or not to leave the Government last October, she did not get wet in public, unlike other deputies.
