This Friday, which is Good Friday, it will be six months since Together for Catalonia (Junts) left the Catalan government in response to the drastic decision adopted by the party's grass roots after certifying the failure to comply with the pro-independence governing agreement under which Pere Aragonès had become president of the Generalitat of Catalonia. Junts, thus, became the second and final investiture partner to break with the Republican Left (ERC) and Aragonès, since a few months earlier the pro-independence, anti-capitalist Popular Unity Candidature (CUP), clearly installed in the opposition in Parliament, had followed the same exit path. In this way it became clear that the government only has the support of the 33 deputies of the Republicans, far from the absolute majority of 68 seats and the 135 parliamentarians of the Catalan chamber.
The two political forces that were the major protagonists of the most important political movement in Europe over the last ten years, the Catalan independence process, are today fighting like cat and mouse, each taking advantage of the slightest opening they can find to pour vitriol on each other. They do not behave as adversaries but as enemies, leaving in their wake a trail of tension and animosity, which will undoubtedly be difficult to repair in the immediate future. Among the major pro-independence parties, there is no looking forward to the municipal elections of May 28th with any will to reach agreement, but rather with the idea that the fewer mayoralties won by the rival party, the better.
And the most newsworthy aspect, although not the most surprising, is that both ERC and Junts are comfortable in this position of adversaries. It can be said quite clearly that the hawks have won over the doves. There are two cases that illustrate this situation: on the part of ERC, the aggressive way in which it has approached the case of Laura Borràs from the beginning. And on the part of Junts, the fact of leaving Aragonès on his own every time he has needed his former partners for an important vote in Parliament.
I have said for almost a year that Borràs should be removed from the position of speaker of the Catalan Parliament, and from the Junts presidency, because of the irregularities she has committed. The sentence of the Catalan High Court is a barbarity, especially given that, in the case of a trial of a political leader, it is the court itself that is requesting that the mechanism of a pardon be used to reduce the sentence from four and a half to two years in prison. And this, when irregularities in the splitting of contracts are, as is well-known, not an exception but a fairly frequent practice. Just why justice doesn't step into this issue is altogether another issue. But, I repeat, Borràs should have left both positions for the good of Junts, which would have been the normal thing to do for a someone who had been a member of a political party for many years.
Another matter altogether is for ERC to take advantage of the Borràs case to take pot-shots at Junts, accusing the party of not having ended corruption and having changed its acronyms but not its ways of doing things. Because it is clear that the current Junts is the same party with which ERC shared the government and those accusations were not heard then. If a few years ago it was said that the spaces of Junts and ERC were doomed to reach an understanding with each other, and they did so from 2012 to 2022, even to the point of a joint electoral candidacy, Junts pel Sí, Together for Yes, in 2015, it is likely that they are very far from allowing that to happen again in the future. Much further away than you might think today.