The interim Parliament, in which the vice presidents perform the functions of a president who has been suspended since July last year, will not be resolved as if by magic with the sentence of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that yesterday sentenced Laura Borràs to four and a half years in prison and thirteen of disqualification for prevarication and documentary falsification.
However, the return to normality and the recovery of the dignity of the institution that all the groups in the Chamber are demanding may be somewhat closer. In principle, it depends on Junts: if you appoint a replacement for Borrà s, ERC will give you its support, but if you don’t, the PSC can take over the presidency with the support, for example, of Ciudadanos, which has already shown its willingness to an agreement with the socialists although the commons also enter into it.
Pending the outcome of the negotiations between the pro-independence parties, the proximity of the municipal elections complicates an agreement between ERC and Junts, regardless of what the CUP does, so that Anna Erra –the name of the mayoress of Vic is the one on the table – be elected the new president of Parliament.
In the middle of the pre-election struggle, the Republicans would not mind, according to parliamentary sources, waiting for the sentence to be final, after May 28, to resolve the “pantomime” that is now being represented in the Chamber, and the ex-convergents have not finished decide if it is better to propose an alternative candidacy or not to denounce in this way the “political persecution” of which Borrà s claims to be the object. There are even those, such as former president Quim Torra, who ask the ERC not to vote for Erra, if necessary.
Thus, the first movement to unblock the situation has been the appeals to the Central Electoral Board presented by Ciudadanos and Vox, to which another from the PP can be added, to withdraw the act from Borràs and name the deputy to the next on the list . If the electoral authority follows the jurisprudence established in the cases of Torra and the anti-capitalist Pau Juvillà and declares the seat vacant, the Bureau will take the election of a new Parliament president to the first plenary session set in the calendar or will convene an extraordinary one for that purpose.
For the moment, the reactions to the sentence that occurred yesterday did not contribute to clearing the horizon: all the political groups in Parliament, except Junts, called for the immediate resignation of Borràs to dignify an institution that in recent times has been on the edge for the privileges of its members.
But each one modulated his speech according to his own interests: in the pro-independence ranks, neither the CUP, which called for his immediate resignation, nor the Republicans, who said that “if he were from ERC, he would have resigned”, supported Borrà s.
The Socialists, who hope that ERC and Junts agree to restore “normality”, said they did not shy away from any responsibility in the face of the “curious situation” that the Parliament is experiencing, not provided for in the regulations, from which it can be deduced that they do not rule out to reach the presidency, and the commoners, who accused Borrà s of “shielding” himself in the Chamber, rejected the pardon requested by the TSJC.
In that they coincided with Ciudadanos, who received the “little help” from the Government of the judicial sentence with surprise, and the PP, who announced that if Alberto Núñez Feijóo arrives at Moncloa he will not forgive Borrà s.
