Catalan president Pere Aragonès has carried out the second reshuffle of his government, the first since Together for Catalonia (Junts) left the executive last October after a surprising decision by the party's grass roots that still stings in many areas of the organization. If, on that occasion, last October 7th, Junts's withdrawal led to the departure of vice-president Jordi Puigneró and ministers Jaume Giró, Victòria Alsina, Gemma Geis, Josep Maria Argimon, Lourdes Ciuró and Violant Cervera and their replacement by portfolio holders exclusively proposed by the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), on this occasion the sackings carried out by Aragonès include only ERC politicians. It can be said that they are, above all, the result of a loss of confidence by the president in the cabinet members he has removed or by the erosion of their respective situations in the three portfolios. The fact that they occur after the Republicans' poor results in the municipal elections makes us presume that the president is readjusting his government with the idea of blocking up some serious leaks so he can then face, first of all, the immediate matter of the Spanish elections of 23rd July and, in second place, the last two years of the Catalan legislature.
The three ministers relieved by Aragonès - Juli Fernàndez (territory), Josep González Cambray (education) and Teresa Jordà (climate action) - are all leaving the executive for different reasons, but in none of the three cases is their departure really much of a surprise. However, the case of Fernández, the former mayor of Sabadell, who has held the position for just 234 days, a little less than eight months, commands attention. His brief time in the department will be remembered for having had to deal with a real headache, the acceptance of the construction of the metropolitan area's fourth beltway - also known as the Vallès beltway - by ERC in order to get the PSC's votes to pass the Generalitat's budget. An agreement that was very unpleasant to digest for someone who had demonstrated in the street against the highway being built, was one of its greatest opponents and always stood directly behind the protest banners. Fernández accepted his role with discipline, not with enthusiasm, and surely this is where his brevity in office comes from.
In the case of González Cambray, what is strange is that he has held on in office for just over two years after his department had been a powderkeg for a long time and he was at odds with all the stakeholders in the education sector. His management was poor and he failed to enter into negotiation over a change as important as the start date for the school year and his substitute Anna Simó will inherit a hot potato as temporary teachers have an indefinite strike on their agenda. As a result of this situation of permanent conflict, with strikes as the order of the day in education, the significant growth in the department's budget, which has gone from 6.15 billion to 6.83 billion euros (an 11% rise), fundamentally for the recruitment of teachers, has been swallowed up in the middle of the various controversies that arrived one after the other.
The third loss from the executive is that of minister Teresa Jordà, who, in this case, has been presented to public opinion in a much more friendly way due to her inclusion in the ERC list for the Congress of Deputies, where she already held a seat between 2011 and 2018, to work in tandem with Gabriel Rufián. We don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but Jordan's plans of a few weeks ago did not include leaving the Catalan government. The terrible drought that is ravaging Catalonia and the controversy over the absence of investments and the lack of aid to farmers - with controversies especially significant in the lands of Lleida - has been her last war horse at the head of the department.
If there are no big surprises among those who have left, president Aragonès has chosen as substitutes, at least in the two most well-known cases, Anna Simó (education) and Ester Capella (territory) profiles that are markedly political and accustomed to negotiating, an essential condition that takes into account the lack of stable support that the minority ERC government has. It is particularly significant in the case of Simó, who will have to pacify a department that she knows well and one that has been in constant turmoil in recent years, first with Josep Bargalló between 2018 and 2021 and these last two years with the controversial Cambray.