It will take something more than the best superglue for the agreement signed by Laura Borràs and Jordi Turull for their leadership of Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) to gain traction with the party membership and, above all, with public opinion, as the best formula for a compact team capable internally of overcoming the obvious discrepancies that exist between many of its members. Borràs and Turull have made an agreement and this, as in any political organization where confrontation tend to be penalized as it is interpreted as power struggle, is an initial piece of good news. Probably for this reason, Borràs and Turull have, despite their enormous differences, made a virtue of necessity, accepting an agreement from which both sides believe that, in time, will end up improving the position reached this Tuesday.
The June 4th congress is thus considered peaceful, as it will only have to vote for one candidate and will return the prominence of the conclave to president Carles Puigdemont and Jordi Sànchez, who are leaving the posts of party president and general secretary, respectively. Puigdemont and Sànchez, since announcing their decision not to run for re-election, have played clearly different roles. The former, formally removed from talks between the two aspirants to lead the party, has followed through in his public commitment to focus on his two priorities, the Council for the Republic and his position as an MEP, in addition, naturally, to his non-transferable role as president in exile. Sànchez, on the other hand, has worked hard for a joint candidacy, prioritizing a new executive that will help Junts to concentrate more on politics and less on declarations.
In any case, it is obvious that Junts is starting a new era in which Puigdemont's oversight will be even less noticeable than it has been in recent times and, from the point of view of his unquestionable leadership, the party is now much more exposed to the elements. The cohesion of the organization will largely depend on how the relationship between Borràs and Turull works and whether a certain discipline can be established in a party in which its members have behaved more as a group of soloists than an orchestra with everyone perfectly synchronised and in tune. In theory, the areas where open discrepancies could occur are not minor, nor can they wait. Specifically, three of them: the party's continuation in Pere Aragonès's government, where they have not all had an identical position up till now; the position on the issue of the Catalan language and immersion, in which ERC, the PSC, the Comuns and the pro-independence civil groups await them in order to sign a joint agreement; and to a lesser extent, the agreements made at the Barcelona provincial authority, the Diputació, and in some municipalities with non-independence parties - in particular, the PSC.
All this, not to mention the political position in Madrid with the government of Pedro Sánchez and the Congress of Deputies, or the agreements already reached with mayors from the other centre-right Catalan pro-independence party, the PDeCAT, who have agreed to join the municipal candidacies of Junts and who are worried that the politics of Junts might take a sudden swerve. It will be in this day-to-day where it will be revealed if the pact is solid and the party able to be sufficiently transversal and empathetic with the electorate to regain the privileged positions of the past. Reading the present will be very important as the current political scenario is far from that of autumn 2017 when the Junts per Catalunya grouping was first articulated, and the positioning of Junt's manifesto in the time ahead, especially in economic, social and security issues, will not be a minor issue. And this is where Junts has a huge gap as it has postponed a debate that is already unavoidable among the many outlooks that converge in this party.