The former president of the Generalitat and Junts candidate for next Sunday’s elections, Carles Puigdemont, has made it clear that he only plans to govern with Esquerra and has recognized that to do so it will be necessary to “heal wounds” between the two pro-independence formations, whose relations are have seen very deterioration in recent years.
In an interview on Catalunya Ràdio, Puigdemont has demanded the independence vote to “lead” this reconciliation with the Republicans and prevent the PSC from governing because “what we are at stake in national terms is very big.”
For the post-convergent candidate, who has once again ruled out governing with the socialist party or making his candidate, Salvador Illa, president, “the only possibility of a coalition government that he contemplates is with the other major pro-independence party, Esquerra Republicana.” According to the Junts candidate, Illa “is the furthest version of the Catalan PSC that we have known in history and the version closest to the interests of Moncloa.”
Puigdemont has admitted that he has not had political conversations with ERC in recent days and has advanced that it will surely be his turn to heal the wounds, “talking and sitting at the same table” with a “greater good to protect, which is the country.”
For the still MEP, it is much easier to heal wounds “between us than to reach agreements with those who have imprisoned us or spied on us”, which is why, in his opinion, both parties have the duty to overcome this situation, to admit that “we have not done it well.”
In this regard, the former president has pointed out that the “technical tie” that has existed in the last six and a half years in the independence movement, between Junts and ERC, “has negatively conditioned” the relationship between the two parties, beyond the repression, because, in his opinion, it has generated two different strategies that “have been neutralizing each other.” “Everything suggests that this technical tie will be definitively broken after many years and this will make things easier,” Puigdemont predicted, however.
In another order of things, the Junts candidate to preside over the Generalitat has reiterated that he will return to Catalonia on the day of the investiture debate that is expected to take place at the end of June and has insisted that his return – he has been away since the fall of 2017 – “It cannot be a personal or party act” but rather it must be an act “with high institutional meaning.” For Puigdemont, returning on the day of the investiture gives his return this institutional meaning of returning to a new president or even to himself the institution that, in his opinion, he tried to preserve in exile after the application of article 155 .
In line with this, he recalled that the amnesty law must be approved by then and consequently the judges must lift the precautionary measures that weigh on him so he should not be detained. Otherwise – Puigdemont has warned – the Spanish authorities would be “disobeying” the law. In any case, the pro-independence leader has disassociated a possible arrest from Junts’ support for Pedro Sánchez’s Government, as long as it is not the State’s legal profession that is seeking to tickle them.” If it were the judiciary, Puigdemont has pointed out, there would be no consequences. in the Executive.
