What was the first; the egg or the chicken? ERC leader Oriol Junqueras has a clear answer to this seemingly unsolvable dilemma: if it had not been for the pardons, there would be no amnesty now.
This Saturday, the same day that the political spotlight has been directed towards Geneva, where the PSOE and Junts have held their first meeting under the supervision of an international verifier, the Republicans have convened a national council to claim that without “previous work ” that they carried out, the law being processed by Congress and that proposes forgetting the crimes related to the independence process from 2012 to 2023 would not have seen the light.
“In recent years we have battled and fought against repression and to free those who were in prison, to reform the Penal Code and to limit the repressive tools that the State has used against our country,” Junqueras exclaimed before his people. .
“We are convinced that all this we have done is what has allowed us to open the way to the amnesty and take it for granted,” stressed the president of ERC, who spent three and a half years in prison for his participation, as vice president of the Government chaired by Carles Puigdemont, in the organization of the referendum on October 1, 2017, declared illegal by the Spanish justice system.
Six years after that date, the path of Junts per Catalunya, a party that Puigdemont has returned to the path of the pact as a result of Pedro Sánchez's need for his seven votes in Congress to be re-elected president of the Government, has forked. that of ERC, which heads the Generalitat alone and in a precarious parliamentary minority for the first time since the Second Republic.
Hence, apart from the amnesty, which will also benefit the Republicans, particularly their general secretary, Marta Rovira, who has lived in Switzerland since the failure of the fleeting unilateral declaration of independence, Junqueras' speech has focused on highlighting ERC government action.
With President Pere Aragonès returning from his official trip to South Korea, the Republican leader, who remains disqualified from holding public office, has stressed that his formation has worked both from the Government and from Congress "for the day-to-day life of the vast majority of society”, something that has been exemplified in the negotiation of increases in the minimum wage and pensions in the last legislature, when Junts systematically refused to collaborate with the left-wing Government, and, more recently, in the achievement of a agreement to reduce the high – and unpayable – debt of Catalonia.
Although he has glossed the "historical record in investments, exports and employment", Junqueras has not let himself be carried away by triumphalism and has denounced the "fiscal deficit of almost 3,000 euros per capita" that prevents Catalonia from "having all the tools it has." the states", which is why the objective of independence, this time after "fighting for an agreed self-determination referendum", remains in force: "It is money that comes out of pockets and does not return to Catalonia. “We are convinced that being a republic would provide us with more resources to improve the lives of citizens.”
