The stage of Laura Borrà s as president of the Parliament ended yesterday, after almost a year of interim – since July 28 – in which the first vice-president, the republican Alba Vergés, has taken her place. The already former president has been left without a seat in the Catalan Chamber and consequently without the title, which she kept, despite being suspended for the corruption case that earned her a conviction.
Now his party will move the internal machinery. Junts will hold an executive meeting next Tuesday to decide his replacement at the head of the Catalan Chamber. Although “Borrà s will be heard”, sources from the training assure that “the decision has been made for a long time” and “consensus”. In fact, the general secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, and Borrà s herself visited Carles Puigdemont in Belgium this week, where the matter would have been on the table.
Even so, the second secretary of the Bureau, the post-convergent Aurora Madaula, who is the most trusted by Borrà s, appeared yesterday after Parliament’s decision to leave all doors open, including the possibility of leaving the seat vacant and the presidency. “We will have to count on this option”, he remarked.
Three names appear in the terna. On the one hand, the deputy and former mayor of Vic, Anna Erra, who did not stand for re-election in Sunday’s elections and her election would be supported by the fact that she is vice-president of the formation, elected in the congress of Alger , where she was the second most voted leader among the militancy (1,791), only behind Jordi Turull (1,845) and ahead of Borrà s (1,776). But Madaula herself and the ex-mayor of Girona, Marta Madrenas, who also did not repeat as a candidate on 28-M, are also playing.
In any case, it is taken for granted that the presidency will continue in the hands of Junts despite the fate of the legislature, which crossed a flying goal in October when Junts left the Government of Pere Aragonès. Whoever replaces Borrà s, ERC has already expressed several times its readiness to facilitate Junts continuing to run the second institution in Catalonia.
With the withdrawal of the seat in Borrà s, his place in the chamber should be occupied by the next person on the post-convergence electoral list, Antoni Castellà , former member of the Democratic Union and founder of Democrats of Catalonia, a party that in the In the last Catalan elections, he formed a coalition with JxCat.
The decision that precipitated the events in Parliament yesterday was the notification it received from the Supreme Court, in which it ratified the resolution of the Central Electoral Board (JEC), which ordered the removal of the seat for having been convicted of a crime against public administration.
On the table of the High Court weighed two allegations against the decision of the electoral arbitrator, one from Borràs herself and another from the Parliament. The Supreme Court rejected the first at the beginning of the month and yesterday the second, and after communicating this to the Catalan Chamber, Vergés urgently called a meeting of the Bureau, to withdraw the minutes.
The decision was quick and almost unanimous. ERC, the PSC and the CUP voted in favor of leaving it off the record and there was only one vote against, that of Madaula. Afterwards, the board of speakers, already with the presence of all the parliamentary groups, agreed to convene an extraordinary plenary session for next week – on Friday 9 June from 12 noon – in which the new presidency will be chosen.
The stage of Borrà s at the head of the Parliament has come to an end and, therefore, the serious “damage” that deputies of almost every political color believe that his case has caused to the institution.
Laura Borrà s has always defended that the cause of corruption for which she was convicted, the fragmentation of public contracts when she directed the Institution of Catalan Letters to favor a friend, was a case of lawfare, a product of the “repression of the State “. But neither the rest of the pro-independence parties, nor many in their own ranks, share this opinion.
The former president was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and 13 years of disqualification for fraud and falsification of documents. Although the sentence is not yet final and has been appealed, the electoral law considers that the deputies who are convicted of crimes against the public administration, as is the case of the crime of prevarication that weighs on Borrà s, incur a situation of superseded ineligibility and consequently must lose the seat.
