Pere Aragonès warns that a "very long interim" at the head of the Parliament's presidency "is not good" and considers that "the best way" to avoid it is "the election of a new presidency".
This is how the president of the Generalitat has pronounced this Sunday in an interview with the Agència Catalana de Notícies (ACN) in reference to the procedural situation that the suspended president of the chamber, Laura Borràs, is going through. Although Aragonès clarifies that, in the event that she ends up being acquitted in the trial for the alleged division of contracts when she directed the Institution of Catalan Letters (ILC), the decision could be reversed.
Aragonès understands that the best possible scenario is that Borràs decides to step aside motu proprio "to protect the institution and try to make his legal defense as clean as possible". "But in the end there is a regulation and the regulation must be applied," he said. A movement that corresponds to Junts.
The position of the also general coordinator of the ERC is not only not new, but he himself has underlined that Junts knew before Borràs was brought to trial that the republican formation would ask to suspend it if the president of the Chamber did not decide to withdraw voluntarily.
Aragonès has also confirmed in the interview that she has not spoken to Borràs since she was suspended. In fact, the last time he spoke with her was during the last plenary session, the week before the Board's decision to apply 24.5 of the regulation to her as she was accused of the crimes of prevarication and false documentation.
This section establishes that the Board "has to agree to the suspension of parliamentary rights and duties immediately" once the act of opening the oral trial in cases of accusation for crimes related to corruption is final.
Junts called last week for the Board to reconsider the agreement on the suspension and they point out that this request will serve to "exhaust all administrative routes" before opening the judicial process in Europe. "They make the decisions they consider appropriate, and we respect it," Aragonés limited himself to saying, confirming that the members of the ERC in the Table -Alba Vergés and Rubén Wagensberg- will be "consistent" with the decision.
"ERC has no interest in having the presidency of the chamber through a substitution in the face of these unwanted circumstances", he said, although he has guaranteed that they will not leave the institution "unattended" and has insisted on making it ugly that it is "in a situation of forced interim".
For this reason Aragonès considers it "essential" that, in order to comply with the agreement between the two parties according to which the parliamentary presidency corresponds to those of Jordi Turull, Junts proposes "a mechanism so that the leadership of the Parliament continues to be exercised by a deputy of his party."
Aragonès has made a call to abandon partisan quarrels, but "if someone considers that they must make a decision" about continuity in the Government -as some sectors of Junts have proposed-, "let them make it". Although he has clarified that all his directors have his confidence and that, therefore, there is no need to make changes in the composition of the executive.
Asked if he considers that Junts has always acted with loyalty, Aragonès has tried to dispel any doubts by replying that "if he believed that it had not been so", he would have made decisions regarding the continuity of the executive.
