This Thursday, the Catalan president, Quim Torra, appeared before the Catalan Parliament in plenary session to respond to the Supreme Courts verdicts, amid high political expectation and with paltry standing with the members of the government and the pro-independence majority in the chamber and, after half an hour on the rostrum, the assessment couldn't be more desolate. No parliamentary group, not even his own, Junts per Catalunya, sided with the only proposal he put on the table: a new referendum on independence this legislature. JxCat and Esquerra, the two members of the executive, kept their distance publicly in an almost merciless way; CUP didn't take it seriously; and the whole opposition, from En Comú to PP, passing through PSC and Cs, called openly for his resignation.
The speech, perhaps the most important of the legislature, since it was about taking the government's response to the unjust sentences to the Parliament, ended in division, long faces and reproaches. Quite the botched job.
The complete silence of the nine political prisoners, logically the primary audience for Torra's speech, was resounding. None of them made the slightest reference during the whole day on social media, the way they communicate their most urgent reflections, to Torra's speech whilst, on the other hand, they did comment over the course of the day on the Marches for Liberty, for example, and on the other protests against the sentences in the streets of Catalonia.
Nor did the members of his government (none of the thirteen who make up the executive council) make any public comment on the president's speech, nor the former members of the government in exile in Belgium and Scotland, nor the pro-independence leaders in Switzerland, nor the senior leaders of Òmnium or ANC. None of them used social media, although many of them post regularly, to rally around him after the speech. There are two reasons for this situation: many of them were displeased they didn't know in advance the content of an important speech which called on them and they are radically opposed to his initiative that the right to self-determination is exercised again during this legislature. Others, disheartened and irritated, because he had put on the table an initiative they had advised him against either because it needed a process to reach political consensus between the different actors of the independence movement, because they are against it or simply because they consider it terribly ill-timed.
In any case, this is one of the disadvantages of tackling the complex current political situation alone or with a limited and reduced circle. The loneliness of power, and that of those who are supposedly on his side. In his televised appearance in an interview with the director of TV3, Vicent Sanchis, on Thursday evening, president Torra failed to take advantage of a new opportunity to lay out his road map for the rest of the current legislature. The headline left, perhaps, was that king Felipe VI had answered the letter he had sent him asking for a meeting saying that he was forwarding the missive to the acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. It was the end of a day that had been terribly hard politically speaking for the president, at a time when Catalonia was about to hold a general strike this Friday and with the outlook of days of demonstrations and protests to come, expected to last a long time.