“In a way, everything that has happened to me since the summer of 2017 is an accident. It has happened to me as it could have happened to another. I am one among many.” Clara Ponsatà (Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1957) , who returned to Barcelona for the first time in more than five years this week and was arrested and released, includes this statement at the end of her memoirs, Molts i ningú (La Campana), in which she defines herself as an “outsider” in Catalan politics that was not bluffing.
The now MEP, who came from academia and was a professor and director at the Scottish University of Saint Andrews without a party card, landed as Minister of Education in the executive of Carles Puigdemont in July 2017, in the final stretch of the legislature, just before the 1-O referendum. She has always maintained this affiliation as an independent and only two days ago, without going any further, she expressed her distance from the Junts project, even though she has a seat in the Parliament thanks to that formation.
His time at the Generalitat was brief, in fact he only had to appear once in all that time from the lectern of the Parliament, and after the referendum he hardly had any public events. At all times he was clear that rather than in jail he would end up abroad after the consultation that the Constitutional Court declared illegal. This is pointed out in the book that was published last year, in which he portrays his impressions of that stage with hair and marks, details many meetings and his vision of the process. He also exposes his realistic view of how these issues work in the international sphere.
So, in July 2017, when she agreed to be a councilor, she decided that she would try not to step foot in prison and that she would go outside of Spain. Her “advantages†of her, she says, is that she had already lived abroad for many years – she was also a professor at Georgetown –, she spoke languages ​​and she should not consult her decision with anyone. Elsa Artadi knew him from the academic field and she had had dealings with the former Minister Andreu Mas-Collell. In addition, she was a friend of the person who was close to former president Artur Mas, Agustà Colomines, she knew the former president himself and Jordi Sà nchez, the latter from his brief stint at the secretariat of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC).
The first call he had to join the executive was that of Artadi, then interdepartmental coordinator in the Generalitat. When she offered him a portfolio in the Catalan executive, which was remodeled for the preparations for 1-O in the final stretch of the legislature, she told him that she would decide the next day, that she had just returned from dinner with friends. “Look, I just got back from dinner and I’ve had a little to drink, call me again tomorrow,” she replied to Artadi. A few hours later, she accepted the proposal that formally came from Mas and met Puigdemont. Proof of how unexpected the election was is that she did not have clothes for the inauguration. She was in Barcelona passing through after a vacation in Greece and had to go shopping. In fact, she herself suggests the possibility that it was the second course or that a woman was missing “because the parity thing was very loose.”
In organizing the referendum, his main function was to guarantee that the schools were open, and although he obtained a copy of the keys to all the schools in Barcelona, ​​it was not necessary to use them due to the initiative to occupy the voting centers from Friday the night.
On October 27, 2017, the day that a resolution was voted in Parliament that included a declaration of independence in the preamble, without legal and legal effects – and that the intervention of self-government was approved in the Senate by article 155 of the Constitución–, Ponsatà left home leaving the blue duffel bag that he carried with him this Tuesday when he arrived in Barcelona already prepared to go abroad and avoid jail.
According to his account, he had already revealed his plans at the meetings of the Executive Council, but he did not coordinate with anyone else when he went to Perpignan on the 28th, although he coincided with the rest of the former ministers in Northern Catalonia. He says that he left the Catalan Chamber “angry” because he knew that “everything was comedy.” “You had proclaimed independence almost by accident,” he recalls that day, when he mistakenly took Puigdemont’s cell phone for a while instead of his. In June 2018, a few months after the referendum, Ponsatà caused a stir when he said from Scotland at an ANC event that the Government “played poker” and “bluffed” with Spain.
She also points out in her memoirs that on the same day of 1-O she would “swear” that she was “the only one who wanted to declare independence immediately and who believed that it had been a victory.” Although shortly after, she asserts, she dropped “her blindfold.” She was her when she heard the speeches of the other political leaders. “I went home alone and angry,” adds the former minister, who in the following days, when the option of reading a declaration of independence and suspending it to try to open a dialogue with the Government was considered, as was done at the end of October 10, she was left alone to oppose.
When the risks to be assumed were calibrated that month of October, Ponsatà said in a meeting on the 26th that as long as the argument of stopping “so that there are no deaths on the table” is used, Catalonia will never be able to be independent, an affirmation that brought I get a lot of controversy after the presentation of the book last year. “There could be blood. But if they [the State] were willing to do it, we should 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.
In the work he also states –after a meeting between the former president of the Catalan Chamber, Roger Torrent, with Puigdemont before the failed investiture in January 2018– that “if the risk of someone going to jail stops us, we will never do anything â€.
From that time, she explains that when she intervened before other politicians, “most of them rolled their eyes as saucers.” “What I was saying, or how I was saying it, had to be different from what was normally heard in there,†she says. “It never seemed to me that my speeches had any effect among my fellow government membersâ€, she affirms at another point in the book, and also considers that overall, in the executive, she detected “very few ideasâ€. “In the face of an unpredictable situation, the first thing that is needed is for people to think and we did not have that,” she adds.
Likewise, Ponsatà defends that without “a monumental cocoa with Catalonia, Brussels will never do anything at all” because international politics is based on fait accompli. But she, he assures, “had neither the attention nor the respect of the group that she decided.” “I was someone who was passing by and who had let himself get into the car,” she illustrates. In any case, those months in which she was in the executive she was out of the main decision-making nucleus, the one known as the “general staff” of the process, something that she now values ​​positively.
After leaving Catalonia, he spent a few days in Paris, and then went to Brussels, where he met his uncle, the former socialist leader Raimon Obiols, with whom, he asserts, he spoke about politics for the first time at that time. In March 2018 she returned to Scotland to teach at the University of Saint Andrews and in February 2020 she returned to Belgium with the act of MEP under her arm due to the change in the distribution of seats in the European Parliament that led to Brexit.
In the parliamentary elections called by the central government in December 2017, he participated in the Junts list, although he resigned shortly after he was issued his credentials. She asserts that no one asked her if she wanted to go on the lists, and that she did not show “a special interest.” But she was present when Puigdemont’s collaborators Albert Batet, Jaume Clotet, Josep Rius and Artadi drew up the list in a Leuven hotel room. She also influenced Colomines at that time.
