For the most part, everything that has happened to me since the summer of 2017 is an accident: it happened to me as it could have happened to someone else. I am one among many”. Clara PonsatÃ, who returned to Barcelona this week for the first time in more than five years, includes this statement at the end of her memoir, Molts i niño (La Campana), in which she defines herself as an outsider in politics that was not of cash
The MEP, who was a professor and director at a Scottish university without a party card – she has disassociated herself from Junts several times and is not a member of it – landed as Minister of Education in the executive of Carles Puigdemont on July 2017, shortly before 1-O.
His time in the Generalitat was short, in fact he only appeared once from the lectern of the Parliament, and after the referendum he hardly had any public events. It was always clear to me that I would end up abroad after the consultation. This is what he says in the book that was published last year, in which he portrays his impressions of that stage with all the pros and cons, details many meetings and expresses his vision of the process. He also presents his realistic view of how these issues work in the international sphere.
So, that July, when she agreed to be a councillor, she decided that she would try not to go to prison and that she would leave Spain if necessary. His “advantages”, he says, are that he had already lived abroad for many years, spoke languages ​​and did not have to consult his decision with anyone.
The first call he received was from Elsa Artadi – he knew her from the academic field, although he also knew other leaders -, then interdepartmental coordinator of the Generalitat. When he offered a portfolio to the Catalan executive, he told him that he would decide the next day, that he had just returned from a dinner with some friends. “Look, I’ve just come from dinner and I’ve had a little drink, call me again tomorrow”, he replied to Artadi. A few hours later he accepted the proposal of former president Artur Mas and met with Puigdemont. His motivation was 1-O. Proof of how unexpected his choice was is that he had no clothes for the inauguration. I was in Barcelona passing through after a holiday in Greece and had to go shopping. In fact, he suggests the possibility that she was the second dish where a woman was missing, because “parity was very loose”.
In the organization of the referendum his main function was to ensure that the schools were open. He obtained a copy of the keys to all the schools in Barcelona, ​​but they did not have to be used, due to the initiative to occupy the centers days before.
On October 27, 2017, the day Parliament voted on the resolution that included the declaration of independence in the preamble, without legal effect, Ponsatà left home leaving the blue backpack he was carrying ready when he arrived at Barcelona, ​​to go away. According to him, he had already explained his plans at the Executive Council meetings, but he did not coordinate with anyone to go to Perpignan on the 28th, although he agreed with the rest of the former councilors in Northern Catalonia .
He left the Chamber “engaged” because he knew that “it was all a comedy”. “We had proclaimed independence almost by accident,” he recalls of that day, when he mistakenly took Puigdemont’s cell phone instead of his own for a while.
She also points out that on the same day of 1-O she would “swear” that she was “the only one who wanted to declare independence immediately, and that she believed that it had been a victory”. Although shortly after, he says, “the blindfold fell” when he heard the speeches. “In the evening I returned home alone and busy”, adds the ex-counselor, who during the following days, when the option of reading a declaration of independence and suspending it was studied to open a way of dialogue with the government, as it did on October 10, was left alone in opposition.
When they calibrated that month of October which risks had to be assumed, Ponsatà said in a meeting on the 26th that as long as the argument of slowing down is used “so that there are no deaths on the table” Catalonia never will be able to be independent, a statement that involved a lot of controversy after the presentation of the book last year. “There could have been blood. But if they [the State] were willing to do it, we had to be willing to pay for it,” he adds. “With the approach of never doing anything if there is a risk of death, we would never do anything”, he concludes.
Of her time in the executive, she explains that when she intervened in front of others “most of them rolled their eyes like oranges”. “What I said, or how I said it, must have been different from what was normally felt in there”, he opines. “It never seemed to me that my speeches would have any effect, among government colleagues”, he states at another point in the book, and also considers that, as a whole, within the executive, he detected “very few ideas “. “Faced with an unpredictable situation, the first thing that is needed is for people to think. And we didn’t have that”, he regrets.
Also, Ponsatà defends that “if there is no monumental cacao with Catalonia, Brussels will never do anything” because international politics is based on fait accompli. But she, she says, “had neither the attention nor the respect of that group”. “I was someone who was passing by and who had let himself get on the bandwagon”, he explains.
After leaving Catalonia he spent a few days in Paris, and went to Brussels, where he met his uncle, the ex-socialist leader Raimon Obiols, with whom he spoke about politics for the first time in that complex moment. In March 2018 she returned to Scotland to teach and in February 2020 to Belgium with the record of MEP thanks to Brexit.
