If there's a world in which you can live among fantasies, it's the world of politics. People's support comes and goes; currently, moreover, at almost light speed. You think you can do whatever you feel like and voters put you right in your place in the blink of an eye, a place that tends to be the way out. This weekend, Marta Pascal made news with her broadside at Carles Puigdemont and, above all, by her speculation as to whether a new party would be created leaving aside the president in exile. "A new party is an option", she said in calculated staging surrounded by cotton wool. Someone who knows like nobody else the world we used to call Convergència defined the move by PDeCAT's former general coordinator with the precision of a surgeon: "Marta's done a Santi Vila". In other words, she's placed herself as a new satellite orbiting around the post-Convergència planet, trusting she'll find a comfortable position in the new galaxy of Catalan politics.
There are those expecting, or rather hoping, that Artur Mas will take a step to the front. Not just to the front of the project, but in front of Puigdemont. Those who see him heading a breakaway know him little. Someone should look carefully at his agenda these weeks, very different to Pascal's. In any case, Mas, because you can never completely count anything out, would be, who knows, at the front (if Puigdemont were to ask him so), not in front. He's not going to support a third path.
It seems it wasn't enough for the Christian Democrat Duran i Lleida to get zero deputies and Unió to dissolve in a flash after the result. Nor with the other failed experiments like that of former minister Fernández Teixidó; of another distinguished Convergència member of the status of Germà Gordó; Espadaler's party, today absorbed into PSC, and various other illustrious names who have tried to make their own ways. For one reason or another, they all had a few days of glory in their goodbyes, but little more. In the case of Pascal, it's striking that she's stabbed her party in the back less than three weeks before the snap Spanish general election on 28th April, a vote which, according to the surveys, is to be especially difficult for JxCat given Esquerra Republicana's momentum.
The fact that two of the party's lists of candidates are headed by two longtime fellow activists, Jordi Turull (Lleida) and Josep Rull (Tarragona), was apparently not an issue. Nor that they are in prison, like Quim Forn, candidate for mayor of Barcelona, and facing an unjust trial with the other political prisoners. Nor that the three should have been members of the youth wing of Convergència for years before her: Turull, for example, since 1983, when he was only 17, by chance the year Pascal was born.
By the way, this politics which according to Pascal is being directed from Waterloo is that which made her a senator for the group that is Junts per Catalunya in the Catalan Parliament. There's no record in the archives of any complaint about this supposed figure that decides everything. Nor any message of thanks for him.