Junts votes in favor today at the Parliament Table on the processing of the popular legislative initiative (ILP) that Solidaritat Catalana per la Independència registered at the beginning of February, a bill that provides for the declaration of independence of Catalonia unilaterally and by agreement with the international community. The draft recorded by three leaders of that extra-parliamentary formation, which in the legislature that ran from 2010 to 2012 obtained four seats with the president of Barça Joan Laporta at the helm, is practically a copy of one that was debated and voted on in the Catalan Chamber in April. of 2011 at the proposal of that same political organization.
Now it arrives at the institution as ILP, so that, if the procedure goes ahead as planned, the promoters will have to collect 50,000 signatures from citizens of Catalonia for it to be addressed in plenary. The mandatory report from the legal services of the Chamber, which is not binding, endorsed that the law is not processed since it deals with issues in which the Generalitat has no powers.
Junts’ position has to do with allowing the debate of the initiatives that reach the Chamber and does not in any case mean an initial adhesion to the proposal; The decision is in line with others that the training has adopted previously. The party is now in another framework, that of negotiation with the PSOE and talks to approve an Amnesty law in Congress. But that does not clash with the formation’s vocation that the Catalan Chamber can debate all issues.
Carles Puigdemont’s party has two of the seven representatives on the Board, the president of the Catalan Chamber, Anna Erra, and the second secretary, Aurora Madaula. The PSC has two other votes, that of Assumpta Escarp and that of Ferran Pedret, and will oppose the rule continuing through the parliamentary process. He hides himself in the aforementioned report from the institution’s lawyers. The CUP, for its part, which has the vote of Carles Riera, was the first force that guaranteed its support for the ILP and ERC, in turn, will abstain, although only the first vice president, Alba Vergés, is expected to vote. Fellow Republican Ruben Wagensberg, who is fourth secretary, is on leave and will not vote.
On the other side of the scale, Ciudadanos and Vox, before the governing body of the institution has decided anything about this ILP, have already threatened to take the members of the Board, especially Erra, to court. In 2011 there was no report from the lawyers since Solidaritat had a parliamentary group and its proposal was processed automatically. On the other hand, an ILP must pass the filter of legal services.
In the articles of the norm, which is identical to that of a few years ago, the Government is empowered to negotiate support and recognition with the international community of a hypothetical secession and to declare independence once that support is guaranteed and as such. endorsed by the majority of the House in a plenary session. It is a law with ten articles and a transitional provision.
Some of the protagonists of that debate are still on the front line today, although they have a different role. On behalf of Esquerra, the now Minister of Education, Anna Simó, took the floor in the plenary session, and on behalf of Convergència i Unió, the general secretary of JxCat, Jordi Turull. They have also changed the meaning of the votes, because the context of 2011 has little to do with that of now. There has been a failed sovereignty process involved and today an amnesty law is being negotiated for those prosecuted for it and the route of negotiation by the hegemonic actors is prioritized.
Thirteen years ago, ERC supported Solidaritat’s initiative and considered the debate “a historic milestone” and asked in that same legislature for binding consultations on the economic agreement and self-determination. CiU, which is not the same as Junts although some of the actors who were in the nationalist federation are now in Puigdemont’s party, abstained after having allowed the Solidaritat initiative to reach the plenary session.
The then president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, who defended a fiscal pact as a priority – an issue that is still being demanded today in the negotiation of Junts and ERC with the PSOE – was absent from the debate and entered the chamber in time to vote, to abstain. However, his spokesperson, Turull, used some words from the then president to justify his vote: “The construction of Catalonia is not a task for the impatient.” The proposal then garnered 14 votes in favor of ERC and Solidaritat, 72 abstentions from CiU and ICV-EUiA and 49 against PP, PSC and Ciudadanos, so that it did not pass the first parliamentary cut.
That debate was something new and came a few months after the ruling that laminated the Statute of 2006 and the large demonstration that flooded the streets of Barcelona in protest as well as the citizen consultations on independence in which 900,000 people participated; It was the prelude to the process. But if that debate ended up weak then, it could be even more so today if it reached the plenary session due to the aforementioned context and the paradigm shift.
In fact, sovereigntist sources call Solidaritat’s measure “extemporaneous” and consider it a “trap” or a “mine” by this extra-parliamentary force against JxCat and ERC. Other actors in the Parliament also understand it this way, even in Ciudadanos. After the independence movement’s agreements with the PSOE in November, this organization – which supported Junts in the 2021 Parliamentary elections – came out to criticize the two formations with terms such as “full surrender.”
In the previous legislature, in 2019, with Roger Torrent as president of the Parliament, the Board already debated the processing of an ILP with a similar intention that was rejected thanks to the abstention of ERC; Junts voted in favor at the last minute. That norm, registered by Unitat per la Independència, unlike the current one, according to parliamentary sources, had clear defects from the start. Four years ago that issue caused a scuffle between Republicans and post-convergents.
