Joan Fuster unites the Valencian Community, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands again

“Joan Fuster would be very happy to see the three ministers together in this act”.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
04 June 2022 Saturday 20:48
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Joan Fuster unites the Valencian Community, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands again

Joan Fuster would be very happy to see the three ministers together in this act”. With these words, the Minister of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Natàlia Garriga, emphasized the importance of the meeting of the three heads of Culture of the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands and Catalonia held this Saturday in Sueca to pay tribute to the Valencian intellectual in the city that saw him born.

Since 2017, when the Declaration of Palma was signed, the ministers of the three governments had not met again beyond a coordinated action in networks to respond to a Supreme Court ruling that prohibited the Valencian administration from addressing their counterparts in Valencian. Catalonia and the Balearic Islands.

The institutional event held in Sueca to commemorate the centenary of the writer's birth – with new faces at the head of the three departments of Culture – was the excuse for the reunion between the three territories.

A unitary act, after each administration has promoted its own acts of homage, in which the three councilors - the Valencian Raquel Tamarit; the Catalan, Natàlia Garriga; and the Balearic, Miquel Company - highlighted the figure of Fuster as a cultural agitator.

However, more than five years after the Declaration of Palma – where the three governments already committed to starting a new stage of relations to strengthen historical and cultural ties and collaboration to seek the common benefit of the three territories – the meeting de Sueca once again puts on the table the real possibility of collaborating.

"We are going to start working again to share culture in all its spheres in all our territories, because together we add up", said Minister Garriga, while she ventured that "this event will be the first of many meetings" and represents "the beginning of a stage of close cultural collaboration between territories".

In this sense, the Catalan councilor explained the will to "concrete the Declaration of Palma and set up working groups for all cultural fields".

It will not be easy because there is little more than a year left for the elections in the Valencian Community and anti-Catalanism and criticism of hypothetical approaches to Catalonia always reappear when an electoral period approaches.