Artur Mas (Barcelona, ??1956) attends La Vanguardia while Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès meet at the Palau de la Generalitat. Assess the political scenario after Sánchez’s investiture and the negotiation between sovereignty and the PSOE. The former president warns of the weakness of the independence movement and points out that “the big issue” to negotiate is the fiscal pact.
How do you assess the political panorama?
It is a great opportunity, even if there is a huge mess and negative feelings. In Spanish politics, a great opportunity has opened up, one of those that happens very occasionally or almost never and has to be taken advantage of from a Catalan and Catalan perspective.
As?
You have to do what you are already doing [negotiate]. Junts could have done something else. If Carles Puigdemont said that he only wanted to talk about the referendum it would have been consistent with what he has said in recent years. Despite this, Pedro Sánchez has been invested. If the independence movement was prepared to take the definitive step, I would not have recommended investing it. But, with the mess that the independence project is in now, we cannot punish the country for the next few years by hiding the inabilities of the independence project and showing what it is not by gesticulating excessively in front of the gallery. What needs to be done is being done. The independence project today does not have the conditions to move forward. That doesn’t mean I won’t have them again.
You had a large majority in the Parliament, especially if you look at it from the current prism, but in Madrid you had no strength due to the absolute majority of the PP.
I will always prefer a significant majority in the Parliament in exchange for greater weakness in Madrid. In my mental and political scheme I prioritize Catalonia and its institutions. If it turns out that there are very thin majorities here – President Pere Aragonès governs with 33 deputies, which is incredible but it is the reality – it is better that this enormous weakness be accompanied by a great capacity for influence in Madrid because unfortunately there are still many decisions taken important decisions that affect Catalonia.
Sánchez and Aragonés have met.
It is part of institutional normality. I reiterate what I said, whoever says that independence will be resolved in the next four years is either not seeing the point or is deceiving. Now we have a golden opportunity in Spanish politics and if that requires meeting with Sánchez as many times as necessary, it has to be done. And nothing happens absolutely. You have to get all the juice possible from the situation.
Do you have the feeling that we have returned to the beginning of the process?
I think we are in the post-process.
So, do you consider the process we have known closed?
Yes, and I think it is better that it be this way, because of these ten long years of sovereign political process, since we have not achieved the objectives we set for ourselves, we have to learn the lessons. As we have known it, the process is already over. This does not mean that the sovereign aspiration has ended or that the objective of independence does not have to be set on the horizon.
How do you see Junts?
More and more organized, each time with a clearer line. And, furthermore, playing the positions that arithmetic has given him reasonably well. It is true that this occurs in a context of loss of electoral support, which affects mainly Esquerra but also Junts. If we don’t say it we don’t make a correct reading of things.
There has been a general decline in sovereignty at the polls.
That’s alarming. It is the great wake-up call for the coming months. There is at most one year left for the Catalan elections and the risk is that the sovereigntist parties will not gain a majority in the Parliament. If that happens, everything changes.
Because?
It would be the Catalans themselves who would say that the independence project is, at the very least, shelved. With a government chaired by Salvador Illa and I don’t know who within the executive – classic tripartites or others like the Barcelona City Council, with socialists, commons and PP -, the enormous opportunity we have in Madrid loses gas. The pro-independence parties will not have the same incentives to do what they do if the Catalan institutions become governed by parties linked to the Spanish parties.
It seems like he’s worried.
Everything will get much more complicated. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it’s the big risk we have. We must recover a roadmap from the sovereigntist parties and a style of doing things and a way of acting that restores confidence to the people who today stay at home or have stopped voting for independence. That is the great challenge and we have one year.
It’s complicated. Relations between Junts and ERC are not good.
Very, very complicated, but for me it is the most important challenge of all from a political point of view. From an economic, social, financial or cultural point of view we have others. I’m not saying that you have to repeat Junts pel Sí, but you have to have a common goal.
Perhaps new leadership is needed for this.
More than the leadership, the fundamental issue is the objective, the project. Leadership is at the service of the objective. People are not more important than projects, I tried to demonstrate it by stepping aside. And projects are not more important than countries. First the country, then the project – your party – and then the person. Everything should work like this, although it is not always like that. If we get to the elections with Junts and ERC throwing things at each other and fighting like monkeys, they will be accused of not having achieved independence and also that they will have lost the pro-independence majority. That has to inspire the performance of the parties from now on.
In any case, as alternatives you have only spoken of tripartites. Don’t you see sociovergence as possible?
From the outset, if Salvador Illa wins, I don’t consider it.
He says that leadership is not the most important thing, but it is relevant. Junts still does not have a candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat. Three names come up: Carles Puigdemont, Jordi Turull and Josep Rull. Do you have any preferences?
It is not a matter of preferences. The person who will make the decision is Carles Puigdemont. If he wants to be a candidate, no one will argue. And if he doesn’t want to be, the candidacy has to be defined, not just the person who heads it. I say this from the outside because I support Junts but I am not inside, I have not taken the step. I support them sometimes publicly and many others discreetly.
Do you plan to join?
I feel close to them, but today I still want to have a certain distance from the parties as a whole. When the internal rupture occurred in the convergent world it was a great disappointment.
The PDECat has lowered the blinds. There are those who say that the brand change was a mistake.
I don’t have a definitive criterion yet. I think about it many times. At the beginning it was clear to me that it had to be done, especially following the confession of former president Jordi Pujol. The differential fact was that. After a few years I’m not so clear anymore, but hey, it’s the same. Good or bad, it has already been done and each one will have their opinion, but more than 70% of the militancy gave support to that idea, which was not to liquidate Convergència, it was to maintain and guarantee the convergent project by sacrificing some acronyms.
Where is that project today?
Today it is in Junts, but Junts is not what Convegència was.
It seems to be moving towards pragmatic positions. Do you think there is a way back?
There is always going backwards in politics, and I don’t see that turnaround being 100% guaranteed because it is impossible in politics… Who was going to tell us that CDC would end up leading the independence process in Catalonia? In the year 2000, 20 years ago, everyone would have said that ERC would lead it and the person who did so when push came to shove was more CDC than ERC. At the moment in which ERC has taken charge of the institutions, the independence project has been put aside, it has not been abandoned, but it is not a priority. You just have to look at this last legislature. Very strange and very curious things happen in politics and making definitive statements… if in life you can never say, in politics even less so. I see Junts more and more in line with a party that is willing to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves and to make an objective reading of things without abandoning the future project.
For now, yes.
But also keep one thing in mind: Junts has been given a label that I am not saying that someone at Junts has not fed. He has been labeled as a party that had climbed the mountain with the blunderbuss in hand and that is not real. That has been a fiction, a label and a self-serving cliché for partisan reasons. I’m not saying that there haven’t been people from Junts and no less who have fueled that discourse. But as a whole, as a party, that label was not true. It was an interested label.
Where do you want to go?
I mean that if Junts had been wanted to have had a participation in the previous legislature of Spanish politics, it would have had it. But he wanted to get away from him.
Are you saying this because of ERC?
It bothered some and others and they were labeled mountain trabucaires.
The image of a party with polyphony and disorder perhaps contributed.
True, but it is no less true that that has already ended in recent months.
What is your relationship with Puigdemont?
Very correct and even good. We have never fought and there is mutual respect. It is true that we have not always agreed on key decisions, but I wish that in the pro-independence world, thinking and acting differently, there would have been the harmony among all the actors that there is between him and me. We wouldn’t have a broken mirror, just a little cracked.
It seems that Jordi Pujol’s figure has been rehabilitated little by little. Can this restoration be completed with the commission of investigation of the Catalunya operation in the Congress of Deputies?
I hope so, I wish for it and I trust that it will be so because it would be pure historical justice. It would be good for the country. Beyond the judgment of opportunity or ethical judgment that can be made about what he explained. From a political, institutional and country point of view, with a historical footprint, the rehabilitation of President Pujol is totally healthy and even essential. And I hope that a proven idea emerges from these commissions, it would be honoring the truth, which is that the criminal and indecent persecution that has occurred against certain people from the Catalan or sovereigntist world has been the hard core of many judicial and police operations. and media. There has been a real conspiracy in the State to destroy people and ideas, a criminal conspiracy. That can’t stay like this.
The judges say they won’t go.
Just because they don’t go does not mean that the facts cannot be investigated. If at some point evidence emerges, as has already emerged, that there was collusion between certain levels of the judicial, political, police and media world, that has to have consequences.
What do you think of the negotiation with the PSOE?
The investiture has been very focused on the amnesty law and the verification mechanisms and some of us hope with delight that in the coming months, in addition to that, not in contrast, we will have a very full basket, not of fish [laughs], of things that benefit the country as a whole, regardless of whether the beneficiaries are pro-independence supporters or not.
Sánchez asks the independence movement for pragmatism in exchange for talking about the economy and self-government.
The pro-independence world should not give up on the idea of ??a referendum, because in the end, one day or another, if the Catalans do not give up, it will be the solution and it will arrive. But it is very evident that it will not happen in the coming years and now the basket must be filled. I believe that what I defended in 2011 and 2012, which had enormous support among Catalans, a fiscal pact in line with the economic concert, is not a big issue, it is the big issue. Although that does not have to nullify the issue of the referendum or the sovereignty of Catalonia.
Is that the great opportunity?
In the same way that I say that the independence movement has a chance, so does the PSOE. It has the great opportunity to promote, from a genuinely Spanish party such as the PSOE, the idea of ??the real Spain, which is not unitary, no matter how much the Constitution says so. It is plurinational, pluricultural and plurilingual. The PSOE can teach that the only possible Spain is this one, because the other is an idea imposed by dictatorships, by Francoists, by absolute monarchs, by judicial systems, by weapons… The great opportunity of the PSOE is that beyond the duties he has to move Spain forward.
We have three negotiation tables. Can you join?
We must mend the broken mirror in the sovereigntist world, that would be a good sign. But the problem is not that there are separate negotiation mechanisms, it is that there is no common approach on the part of the Catalan negotiators. If everyone has to negotiate on their own, so be it, but there must be a shared model and objective.
Are you in favor of Junts agreeing with the PSC in Barcelona?
I have no criteria. It is evident that without Xavier Trias as mayor Junts needs to make future leadership visible in the City Council and I don’t know if it is better to do this from the government, even if it is in second position, or from the opposition. I come from a stage in which we leaders forged ourselves in the opposition if necessary. I was in opposition for eight years in the City Council and in the Parliament, always winning the elections, another seven. I have sucked fifteen years of opposition. I recognize that I was much more of a leader going through the opposition, that is my school and my learning.
Xavier Trias is back. Will we see his return to the front line?
In politics there is no such thing as never, we have already said it. But the answer now is no. I don’t want to be a prisoner of my words, I don’t know what I will think in a while. Life changes a lot and I don’t know what will happen in the future, everything is open. I have already been on the front line for 30 years; I know how to get in and how to get out.
