Pasqual Maragall has already passed through the Autonomous Communities commission where the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, will speak today. It was in May 2006, when the Upper House had to approve the new Statute and the veto presented by the Popular Party was being discussed. The regional presidents were invited, as today, but except for the ineffable Cantabrian president, Miguel Ángel Revilla, all the regional governments, those of the PP, but also all the socialists, decided to send second-level representatives.
Maragall, who had already lost the shine of his long gaze, defended the pact between Spain and Catalonia, the one that from the beginning had illuminated his drive to renew the Statute. In the old, nineteenth-century Senate room – this time Aragonés will speak in a somewhat more nondescript room – the president demanded the recognition of the Catalan nation as a guarantee of political stability. “Would Spain gain something by refusing to recognize that clamor? She would lose. “I would lose my sense of reality and I would lose the respect of millions of Catalans,” said the president.
Maragall already knew then that the word nation would only appear in the preamble of the Statute as an expression of the will of the Parliament. Spain would continue to call Catalonia a nationality. The president of the government, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, and the leader of CiU and future president, Artur Mas, had agreed on that famous January night at the Moncloa in which, in the absence of Maragall, the agreement for the renewal of the Statute.
But, Maragall, stubborn, did not give up in the attempt to explain himself to political opponents who in all probability, in today’s session, will use words not very different from those of then. The president did stay to listen to them, if not all of them, then a good part of them. Forms had not yet been lost. But that was a sad session. Cold. The PP’s veto of the Statute was rejected by 25 votes against 24. As always, barely.