The change of strategic course that Carles Puigdemont has imposed on Junts per Catalunya has reached out to new allies, unthinkable until recently, while at the same time it has relegated almost all of the party’s leaders from the decision-making processes, including to those who had specific weight when drawing up the roadmap. The most striking case is that of Laura Borràs, whom Puigdemont and Jordi Turull, secretary of the party, have removed from executive control of the party, despite the fact that she continues to hold the position of president of Junts. Borràs was left out of the negotiation with the PSOE for the investiture and did not go to Geneva (Switzerland) last week to agree on the figure of the verifier. “The internal fight exists, but if Laura Borràs slams the door, she takes 50% of the militancy with her,” analyzes a person from Borràs’ circle of trust.
The loss of influence of the president of Junts emerges after her judicial sentence to 4 and a half years in prison for cutting up public contracts and coincides with the interest within the party for Puigdemont to occupy some organic position. He former president He pilots the pactist course that the party now embraces, but he does not represent any position in the organizational chart, which prevents him from attending executive meetings and giving explanations to the militancy.
After 23-J, Puigdemont argued to Borràs that her status as a judicial convict advised keeping her away from the negotiation with the socialists, considering that one of the keys to the deal had to be defining the terms of the judicial amnesty for the derived cases. of the processes. The former president relied on Jordi Turull and Míriam Nogueras, spokesperson for Junts in Congress. “The negotiating team was always the president, the general secretary and the spokesperson in Congress,” say sources close to Puigdemont. Closing the circle of collaborators, the former president It sought to secretly protect the terms of the negotiation, even at the cost of inconveniencing Borràs or other senior Junts officials, such as the president of the parliamentary group, Albert Batet.
The composition is maintained when Junts has already considered the amnesty screen to be over and is trying to achieve different deals with the socialists. Last weekend, in Geneva (Switzerland), Puigdemont only summoned Nogueras and Turull to agree with the number three of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, on the name of the international verifier. “Nothing is done behind the president’s back,” they clarify from those around Borràs.
She herself has disagreed that her status as a judicial convict could interfere with any negotiations, and she is categorical when she denies that her sentence for corruption could be a burden for the party. For now, she has chosen to keep her tone low in public, but in the company of colleagues from the training, Borràs often brings up a conversation she had with Jordi Pujol, a watchword for a sector of Catalan nationalism. Pujol, who has confessed that his family had an undeclared fortune abroad, has acknowledged Borràs’s ability to not be stained by the “stain” that corruption usually leaves.
Borràs, 53 years old, has a penchant for devouring books one after another and then takes advantage of his profound literary knowledge to truffle quotes with intellectuality, in the form of a hint or message, which hangs on his other great passion: social networks. The good writing that she exhibits, as well as the honeyed tone that she usually gives to her voice, does not hide a volcanic character and in Junts we observe with special attention how the president values the pacts closed by the Puigdemont-Turull tandem with the PSOE, once considered a kind of bête noire for the Catalan independence movement. “The party is aware that if Laura Borràs says that the pact is good, the most exalted part of the militancy will consider it good,” Junts acknowledge.
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The leader relies on her good communication skills to connect with the most excited sector of the independence movement, the one that rejects the methods of traditional politics and defends the need for Catalonia to break all relations with Spain. Borràs has even written a book in which she defines herself as “Daughter of October 1”, in reference to the illegal referendum of 2017. When she was dismissed from her position as president of the Parliament, she demanded a salary and an official car from the party. .
In Junts, the president’s reactions become important to evaluate the balance of forces in the party, since she has been removed from the negotiating process and is supposedly free to evaluate deals that do not directly involve her. “The president has warned that there is a good chance that this will not go well,” admits a source close to Borràs.
After the elections, Puigdemont contacted Turull and Borràs to ask that they leave in his hands the conditions that they were going to set for the PSOE to support the re-election of Pedro Sánchez. Puigdemont, who left for Belgium in 2017 to avoid being tried, argued that he was facing a historic opportunity to force negotiation. Borràs had boasted during the campaign that she always closed the door to the PSOE, and recalled that when she was a deputy in Congress she never even approved the accounts of the Socialist Executive. “During the PSOE mandate, the State has not stopped criminalizing the Catalan independence movement,” Borràs stated at a rally, a week before the elections. In March, the president of Junts was sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison and 13 years of disqualification for cutting up public contracts to benefit an acquaintance of hers. The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) convicted her of falsifying an official document and administrative prevarication following a case that, according to her, is an example of lawfareinterested use of justice for political purposes.
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