"The moment has come". Barely three months after the launch of Centrem, which held its founding congress on May 7, its general secretary, Àngels Chacón, abandons active politics and leaves the project, which is plunged into a serious internal crisis before the next electoral appointment, the municipal ones of 2023.
Chacón throws in the towel after having been unable to bring order to Centrem, a new centrist, liberal and Catalan formation that was born with the ambition of occupying the space that CiU once monopolized and that the independence process blew up in endless acronyms .
In a letter sent yesterday to the militancy, Chacón attributes her decision to the "internal struggles" and the "distribution of power quotas of the parties" integrated in Centrem: the PDECat -which she herself led and of which she was a candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat–, the Lliga Democràtica, Convergents and Lliures.
After the PDECat was left without representation in Parliament in the 2021 elections with 77,000 votes, these four formations agreed, after long negotiations, to launch a new organization, but the persistence of "some dynamics ” partisans and the lack of “transversality” have made Chacón give up continuing to lead the project.
The one who was Minister of Enterprise and Knowledge in the Government of Quim Torra vindicates her management career since she took the step from the private sector to politics when she was elected councilor in Igualada in 2011 and argues that her departure is due to the impossibility of implant in Centrem the “new broad and open organizational concept” that she proposes and, as she confesses in the letter, to her inability to “enjoy the organic life of the party”.
In this sense, Chacón expresses her conviction that those who dedicate themselves to politics should have worked outside of it before to know the social and economic reality of the country and she says she is very calm about being able to return to private enterprise, in which she never they have lacked offers, they assure in their environment, to "earn a living".
These reproaches to a certain way of doing and understanding politics, however, do not lead the former minister –proud of having served the citizenry and the ideals in which she believes– to renounce her militancy, and for this reason she will not leave Centrem, a project designed to overcome the "instability" of Catalonia and overcome the "blockade" that paralyzes its economic potential.
Even so, if Chacón has made this "terribly difficult" decision, they analyze in their surroundings, it is because the former minister has grown tired of "dealing with the egos" of some of her fellow ranks and the "reluctance to add" of those who "keep thinking about the initials of before" and do not want to "integrate fully" in Centrem.
Certainly, the confluence of formations as different in identity issues as the PDECat itself or Convergents, where independence yearnings survive, with parties such as Lliures or the Lliga Demòcratica, observed by some of the former as a Trojan horse of "stale constitutionalism", has been , recognize these sources, always tense.
"Some have never wanted to stop ruling behind the scenes," they recall, and point to the attempt by Germà Gordó, leader of Convergents, to obtain more representation in the management of Centerm from the beginning, which is why the former Minister and former leader of CDC unsuccessfully promoted an alternative candidacy to that of Àngels Chacón.
Thus, the shared ideological framework of respect for legality and rejection of unilateralism – a factor that precipitated the removal of Chacón by Torra in September 2020 – and the search for consensus based on economic liberalism have not been a sufficient amalgam for such a different ingredients. And the challenge of finding a new leadership to achieve it is enormous.
