It is not yet known whether Carles Puigdemont will play any role in the new Junts Executive, but it is already taken for granted that the former president will take total power in the party next weekend, when the party will hold its congress in Calella. It is not that the former president did not already have the last word in the formation whenever he wanted. But in recent years he has exerted his influence intermittently, has put himself in the spotlight in some decisions and has maintained structures in the party that could go against him or his closest collaborators, at least in theory.
But, if everything goes as planned, that will change starting with the Calella congress, whether the leader chooses to take the reins of the party again as president or if he prefers to stay outside but draws up a direction of his strictest confidence. Whatever happens, Puigdemont and the Puigdemontistas will occupy key positions in the new leadership. And this circumstance evaporates the hopes that Pedro Sánchez’s Government maintained that Junts would move towards post-Puigdemontism.
Since signing the agreement for Sánchez’s investiture, in the summer of ’23, Junts has been determined to demonstrate to the PSOE that it is not a partner that they can count on as insurance. And yet, in the Government they have never stopped considering Puigdemont’s people as possible support. Among other reasons, because agreements have been built with Junts on different matters, but above all because with them against the parliamentary sum becomes impossible.
Sánchez can afford not to count on Junts, but he cannot govern against Junts. And it is not a pleasant dish to have a volatile, unpredictable or indecisive party either. That is, a Junts led on a day-to-day basis by Puigdemont.
For this reason, since last spring, in socialist circles, including those around the Government but also the PSC, people began to fantasize about the possibility that the amnesty would act as a grease for Junts to change stages and disengage from the dynamics that radiate Waterloo. The dream seemed perfect. A Puigdemont who returned to Catalonia to settle, who focused on Catalan politics and who, knowing his little interest in organic party matters, little by little left room for new figures to emerge, perhaps new internal currents, perhaps a generational change that would retire the 2017 veterans…
None of that is expected to happen next weekend in the Barcelona town of Calella. First, because the amnesty has not been applied to Puigdemont, which is why his return has been limited to the fleeting appearance in Barcelona, with police ridicule included. He has also not held the position of opposition leader that would correspond to him, but he is also delaying the decision on whether or not to serve as a deputy, despite the fact that during the campaign he assured that if he were not president he would retire from politics. And he has even returned to reside in Waterloo, after announcing the “end of exile.”
With this panorama, Puigdemontism has not only not subsided, but has gone from being the central lane of Junts to being the only possible one. With Laura Borràs deactivated and hers out of the game, without the moderate wing having been able to structure itself and with the figures of the old PDeCAT moving more towards the PSC than towards Junts, the party that aspires to become the central pillar of the independence movement It is an organization almost only structured around the leadership of the former president.
Make the ‘de facto’ address official
At the last Junts congress, held in 2022, something unexpected happened. After an agreement between Borràs and Turull to hold a unity conclave, the then president of the Parliament believed she had a free way to occupy key positions in the party leadership. But the Turullistas gave the surprise and showed in the votes a force capable of overwhelming Borràs’s supporters. The message was clear: although Borràs would be the president, Turull, general secretary, controlled the party.
Borràs’s isolation was even more pronounced when, after the general elections, Puigdemont once again took the wheel of the organization and created a steering committee outside the structures established in the party. A command bridge tailored to the leader’s taste and who has made the main decisions of the party since that moment.
Looked at this way, and according to a voice critical of the dynamics followed in Junts, what is expected from the Caella congress is that this direction that has been operating ‘de facto’ now becomes the real executive. For this reason, the rise of the group formed by Turull, Míriam Nogueras, Albert Batet, Josep Rius and Mònica Sales is taken for granted.
Other rising figures, and also very close to Puigdemont, would be Toni Castellà, a former deputy who has recently been the visible face of the Consell per la República, Salvador Vergés, a deputy who is very popular in Waterloo, or even Agustí Colomines, a man who already He was the ideologist of Artur Mas, who has appeared at various times close to the figure of the former president and who in this legislature has reappeared as a deputy in the Parliament.
Ups and downs with the Government
There are some paradoxical elements in the relationship between Moncloa and Puigdemont. To begin with, it was Sánchez’s interest in obtaining the votes of Junts that made the former president return to the controls of the organization, which until then he had left in the hands of Turull. But, in addition, Puigdemont’s participation was necessary for the strategic shift to occur that led Junts to sign an investiture agreement.
However, more than a year after that, fears are growing in the PSOE that Puigdemont could end up being one of the main obstacles to a normalization of Junts in Congress. Socialist sources believe that Puigdemont is attentive to a “personal agenda”, and not so much to the work that would correspond to a party that in Catalonia leads the opposition and in Congress can be a cornerstone for issues such as budgets.
To top it off, the arrival of Salvador Illa to the presidency of the Generalitat has ended up throwing the former president’s plans out of whack. “This thing about being allies in Madrid and enemies in Barcelona was already tried by ERC and it ended the way it did,” reasoned a few weeks ago a former convergent politician, who defended that both, socialists and Junts, should opt for a single model of relations that would serve both in the Parliament as in the Congress.
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