Laura Borràs' period as president of the Parliament ended yesterday, after practically a year of interim – she would meet on July 28 – in which the first vice president, the Republican Alba Vergés, has held her duties. The already former president has been left without a seat in the Catalan Chamber and consequently without the title that she held, despite being suspended for the cause of corruption, it earned her a sentence.
Now his party will move the internal machinery. Junts will hold an executive next Tuesday to decide his replacement at the head of the Catalan Chamber. Although "Borràs will be heard", training sources assure that "the decision has been made for a long time" and "agreed upon". In fact, the General Secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, and Borràs herself visited Carles Puigdemont in Belgium this week, where the matter could well have been on the table.
Even so, the second secretary of the Table, the post-convergent Aurora Madaula, of the maximum confidence of Borràs, appeared yesterday after the decision of the Parliament to leave all the doors open, including the possibility of leaving the seat and the presidency vacant. “We will have to count on her,” she remarked.
Three names appear in the list. On the one hand, the deputy and former mayor of Vic, Anna Erra, who did not stand for reelection in Sunday's elections and her election would be endorsed by being vice president of the formation, elected at the Argelers congress, where she was the second leader most voted among the militancy (1,791), only behind Jordi Turull (1,845) and ahead of Borràs (1,776). But Madaula herself and the former mayor of Girona, Marta Madrenas, who also did not repeat as a candidate on 28-M, also appear.
In any case, it is taken for granted that the presidency will remain in the hands of Junts despite the future of the legislature, which went through a flying goal last October, when Junts left the Government of Pere Aragonès. Whoever takes over from Borràs, ERC has already stated on several occasions its willingness to make it easier for Junts to continue directing the second institution in Catalonia.
With the withdrawal of the seat in Borràs, his place in the hemicycle should be occupied by the following in the post-convergence electoral list, Antoni Castellà, ex-militant of Unió Democràtica and founder of Democrates de Catalunya, a party that in the last Catalan elections allied with JxCat.
The decision that precipitated the Parliament's decision yesterday was the notification it received from the Supreme Court ratifying the resolution of the Central Electoral Board (JEC), which ordered the withdrawal of her seat for having been convicted of a crime against the public administration.
On the table of the High Court weighed two allegations against the resolution of the electoral referee, one from Borràs herself and another from Parliament. The Supreme Court rejected the first at the beginning of the month and yesterday the second, and after communicating it to the Catalan Chamber, Vergés urgently called a meeting of the Board, to withdraw the minutes.
The decision was quick and almost unanimous. ERC, PSC and the CUP voted in favor of leaving it without minutes and there was only one vote against, that of Madaula. Then, the board of spokespersons, already with the presence of all the parliamentary groups, agreed to convene an extraordinary plenary session for next week – on Friday, June 9 starting at 12 noon – in which to elect the new presidency.
Borràs' period at the helm of Parliament came to an end and, with it, the serious "damage" that deputies of almost every political color believe that his case has caused in the institution. Borràs has always defended that the cause of corruption for which she was convicted, the fragmentation of public contracts when she directed the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, was a case of lawfare, the product of "State repression". But neither the rest of the pro-independence parties, nor many in their own ranks, share his opinion.
The former president was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and 13 years of disqualification for prevarication and document falsification. Although the sentence is not yet final and has been appealed, the electoral law considers that the deputies who are convicted of crimes against the public administration, as is the case of the crime of prevarication that weighs on Borràs, incur in a situation of supervening ineligibility and therefore they must lose their seat.
