The Parliament of Catalonia entered a new phase in this legislature yesterday with the election of Anna Erra as president of the institution. The Catalan Chamber, which since the restoration in 1980 had never changed its highest figure in the middle of the legislature, was in an interim situation, with the presidency suspended since last July. This circumstance has come to an end with the loss of deputy status of her predecessor, Laura Borrà s, who had refused to resign at all times.
After failing to obtain an absolute majority in the first attempt, Erra, vice-president of Junts and acting mayor of Vic until next week, was elected in the second vote –secret and by ballot box– with the support of 64 deputies from the parliamentary groups of Junts and Esquerra –plus a symbolic vote of the CUP ceded due to the impossibility of ex-minister LluÃs Puig to vote–; 20 more of the 44 gathered by the second vice president of the Roundtable, the socialist Assumpta Escarp, who had support from the commons and the PP – the same formula that Jaume Collboni wants for the PSC to lead the Barcelona City Council.
In her first speech, Erra combined the institutional sense of the position she now occupies with the line set by her predecessors, and wanted to expressly pay homage to the former president of the Chamber, Carme Forcadell, who in some forums has been booed by the most radicals of the independence movement in recent months.
In his speech, he remembered Miquel Coll Alentorn, a Convergència i Unió politician and president of the Chamber between 1984 and 1988, when he called for “tolerance and mutual respect” from all deputies, and the Republican President of the Generalitat Francesc Macià , who with the inauguration of the Parliament in 1932 claimed its own institution that would allow it to elaborate its own laws and in Catalan.
On this last question, Erra asked that the Catalan Chamber be “an example and a model in relation to the use and normalization of the Catalan language”, because, he justified, “it continues to be the minority language in its linguistic domain”. “I want to ask the deputies that our Parliament be an example of normality of our language without prejudice, naturally, to the other official languages ​​of Catalonia”, the new president concluded in this regard.
The post-convergent leader also promised to exercise a “full presidency, with rigor and all her powers”, and announced that she will travel throughout Catalonia to listen to the needs of all citizens, claiming her origin from Vic, from a region and not from the Catalan capital. “Not only will this Parliament have its doors open to everyone, but I intend to tour the country,†she said.
Likewise, the second authority of Catalonia assured that it will defend “the sovereignty of Parliament above all else” and the right to “debate, speak and vote on everything that the groups agree on”; and that it will also defend “the rights of all deputies.” “I will defend the institution from any external interferenceâ€, assured Erra, who stressed that he will maintain the “democratic demand and defense of the political rights of the deputiesâ€, as well as the “modernization and transparency of the institution†that began, according to what he said, at the beginning of the legislature with Laura Borrà s as president.
In any case, for this, he asked all the deputies of the Chamber to get involved in “defending the dignity and independence of the Parliament”, and to work to change the current regulations that conflict with the opinions issued by the Committee of Human Rights of the United Nations that point to the violation of political rights in some cases with the leaders of 1-O. “If we want to be demanding, we have to start with ourselves,” he remarked in that regard.
Erra, who before taking the step to institutional politics in the Vic City Council in 2007 was a teacher for more than 20 years, will be released in plenary session next week, with a monograph on Education.
