Since he took charge of Esquerra in 2011, Oriol Junqueras has referred to the need to build his political project around the diversity of the Catalan population. Yesterday he insisted on it again and directly demanded the vote of the foreign community residing in Catalonia to achieve “freedom and independence.”
He did it in Reus. He took charge of yesterday’s campaign event in the absence of the ERC candidate for the May 12 elections, Pere Aragonès. “We want to build a project aimed at everyone (…). It is very likely that all those who have come here, in their countries of origin, also fought for causes of freedom and justice against dictatorships or the misery imposed on them by the privileged,” Junqueras stated and then offered the ERC project and asked in turn aid. In this way, the president of Esquerra considers that it is essential to build complicities to win “not elections, but freedom, the republic and independence.”
The leader of the Republicans reached this point after reviewing the history of their formation. Among other things, he asserted that it was the ERC militancy that distributed all the ballot boxes for the referendum of October 1, 2017. Even so, he admitted that the “definitive referendum” is yet to come, but he believes it is possible. This is why he demanded to concentrate the vote in his party.
However, Junqueras regretted the large number of foreigners who live in Catalonia without the right to vote. It is estimated that there are close to a million people. “We cannot agree that more than a million people cannot go to vote and decide the future that they want and that is good for our children and our grandchildren.”
Also in Reus were the until now deputy in the Parliament Irene Aragonès, the former president of the Parliament Carme Forcadell and the head of the list in Tarragona, Raquel Sans. The candidate boasted of policies carried out by the Government, such as free education in preschool 2, the limitation of housing rental prices or the free use of menstrual products.
To these initiatives would be added a national pact for administrative simplification, which ERC proposes to reduce bureaucratic procedures and promote the single window that the agricultural sector demanded.
