The former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas said this Friday in a radio interview that he was surprised that Junts per Cataluya voted against the Amnesty law in the Congress of Deputies on January 30, but he stated that the party wants to ” improve it with the desire that it ends up seeing the light”. “The decision surprised me, but I spoke with Jordi Turull and I understood it,” said the former leader, who highlighted that the general secretary of JxCat gave him “all the appropriate explanations.”
“I understood that they had made a decision that is not definitive,” said Mas, who pointed out that the approval of the law will be seen, he said verbatim, depending on the negotiation that has been established.
At the same time, the Minister of Social Rights, Carles Campuzano, who is independent in the Government, has spoken out on that issue and has demanded from Junts “fineness” in the negotiation and that the rule does not end in stone in an act organized by New Economy Forum.
The former general coordinator of the PDECat, Marta Pascal, also regretted this Friday that JxCat voted against the law, although she assured that she was not surprised by the “turn of the script” by former president Carles Puigdemont. “I think I know him a little, at least with the experience I had with the motion of censure in 2018 with Mariano Rajoy. It has been very good for me to understand how he behaves politically and at the negotiation level, but I thought that the risk he takes Junts saying ‘no’ to this law only with the excuse of wanting to negotiate more is too high,” he explained in an interview in Ser Catalunya.
In his opinion, Junts could not assume this risk, which is why it has appealed to the formation to “rethink” to carry out an amnesty that it considers necessary and fundamental. And, according to Pascal, the amnesty has required “an element of extraordinary political courage” on the part of the President of the Government Pedro Sánchez in the face of the pressure that he considers exerted by a certain Spanish right.
After warning that Junts’ position could erode trust with the PSOE, he believes that there are “landing pads” to resolve the problem, and has hoped that the page can be turned in the independence process once the amnesty is approved.
When asked about the differences she had with Puigdemont when she was general secretary of the PDECat, she explained that they were based on the fact that she maintained that the independence process “could not be done unilaterally, and that a change of political board in Spain was necessary.” , something that the former president was opposed to.
After Junts’ agreement with the PSOE for Sánchez’s investiture, Pascal has assured that, intimately, he thought that Puigdemont has ended up understanding “that one is in politics to generate changes, transformations and to take advantage of the opportunities that the situation gives you.”
The former spokesperson for the defunct Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC) has explained that she currently feels “orphaned by the party” as a pragmatic Catalan center-right voter, and considers that ERC and the PSC are in search of these voters. Regarding Junts, she has denied that they are the heirs of CDC “neither in the way they do things nor in many parts of their program”, despite the fact that a part of their members transitioned to said formation. Furthermore, she has expressed the opinion that it was “a mistake” to dissolve CDC and change its name after the alleged cases of corruption that plagued the formation. “The PDECat had to fight against all this,” said Pascal, who also regretted the closure of the party of which she was general secretary.
