Carles Puigdemont participated yesterday for the first time in an electoral event without screens after several years of online presence. This dynamic will be repeated in the coming weeks with the Junts per Catalunya campaign, with the aim of showing that this time the former Catalan president will indeed return for the investiture debate in Parliament when the time comes and that there is no other candidate than he He will be the protagonist and the main performer.
The post-convergent leader, who now lives in the south of France, in the region of Vallespir, received a mass bath at the presentation of the training lists for the May 12 elections at the old schools of Elna. In the same venue where he met Oriol Junqueras for the first time in July 2021, after the prisoners in the process were pardoned, in an event organized by Òmnium Cultural, more than 2,000 people gathered – according to the data provided by the organization – and three hours before the rally began there were queues in the street.
At that same moment, at the Elna Town Hall, the Junts national council ratified the nominations by acclamation.
The ex-president took advantage of his intervention to ask for passage and establish himself as an “alternative” to the Republicans. He described the Executive of Pere Aragonès as “no north” and “incapable”, and asked for a “new impulse” for Catalonia. “The Government has lost the north and is unable to face the transformations, some of which are very urgent, that the country needs”, remarked Puigdemont, who also pointed out that the Executive “is unable to rebuild the political and social majority of the polls to culminate independence”. After that, he pointed out that his training is the alternative.
There were also criticisms of the management of the Republicans – whom he criticized for the “easy and legitimate resort of taking a well-known face” like that of Tomàs Molina -, either for some of the Catalan president’s trips abroad, or for the organization of the oppositions that were chaotic a year ago.
The idea of ??Junts is that the vote on 12-M be a plebiscite between Salvador Illa, leader of the PSC, and Puigdemont and, incidentally, undo the technical tie between Junts and Esquerra from the last electoral appointments. They want the campaign to be projected as a face-to-face between the two leaders and for that they need to leave ERC behind.
Likewise, in his speech, which followed that of the candidates from Girona, Lleida and Tarragona – Salvador Vergés, Jeannine Abella and Mònica Sales – and a video presentation of number two, the businesswoman Anna Navarro, who is still in San Francisco, there was a defense of the direction and service sheet of Junts of these last months and years, from the departure of the Aragonese Executive in October 2022 until the no to the Amnesty law in the first vote that took place in the Congress of Deputies, one month before the final approval. “Time has proved us right”, assured Puigdemont.
Thus, the Junts leader vindicated the decision to leave the decision to leave the Catalan Government in the hands of the party’s militancy. “In a Government that does not comply with the agreements we reached and rejects our proposals, we could not continue”, he justified.
Regarding the Junts group’s refusal to criminal oblivion in the Lower House in January, the post-convergent leader emphasized that “the central government is the one that has understood better” that “when Junts says no, it means no”. “They thought we were hunting. We don’t want to make friends or look for new allies, we will serve Catalonia, and if to serve we need to say enough, we say it”, said the former president, who concluded with the statement that apart from him “none of the other candidates are in a position to offer this and to stand up to the Spanish Government to defend Catalonia”.
Not long before, he had pointed out that the “nations without a State in Europe are few” and that “this must be noticed by the Catalan Government”. “You cannot be the president of an autonomous community under the tutelage of a Spanish ambassador”, pointed out Puigdemont, who asserted that it is also necessary to “feed hope”. “The people are not only matter, they are also soul and spirit. If we don’t take care of this, we will have a region instead of a nation”, he replied.
