Jordi Pesarrodona resigns as vice president of the ANC and thirteen more people leave the leadership

Resignation en bloc with a weighty name among them: Jordi Pesarrodona, the vice president of the ANC.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
18 February 2023 Saturday 11:24
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Jordi Pesarrodona resigns as vice president of the ANC and thirteen more people leave the leadership

Resignation en bloc with a weighty name among them: Jordi Pesarrodona, the vice president of the ANC. Locked up tight in the Center Moral i Cultural del Poblenou, on Pujades street in Barcelona, ​​with the blinds closed and a blue star and a black star at the door, the national secretariat of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) has met this Saturday for about nine hours to end up falling apart. The twenty members of the critical management have not managed to get the leader, Dolors Feliu, to leave office or to modify the permanent committee - a body made up of twelve members of the leadership that manages the day to day, including the president and the even today vice president. Result? Thirteen members of the secretariat have left the ship, in addition to the number two of the entity. Now it remains to be seen if the resigners and critics who have decided to stay try to force a general assembly among all the partners to choose a new leadership.

Attempts to avoid the break have not worked. Dolors Feliu supporters made a move on Friday to avoid the crisis. Uriel Bertran, who was to hold the vice-presidency starting next May, gave up this option in favor of Jordi Pesarrodona. It has been of no use.

The debate on the advisability of beginning to lay the foundations for the creation of the independence civic list for the next elections to the Parliament has caused the discontent of critics with the permanent committee and the leader of the ANC to reach the limit. The wayward denounced a few days ago the "centralization, authoritarianism and abuse of power of the current majority" of this governing body, and Feliu, of "bad practices" when trying to accelerate that candidacy. They also reproached the "lack of respect, disqualifications, falsehoods and judgments of intentions" of this permanent committee, where ten of the twelve are considered related to the president. In addition, the dissidents consider that the committee has assumed transcendental functions that, they assure, are not their responsibility.

In short, the critics affirm that this body exceeds its functions and assert that the executive body should be the secretariat, which has formed up to now 68 people.

An example of this was, in the opinion of the critics, the will of the president to speed up the work to create the civic list. However, at its meeting on January 28, the secretariat rejected by 28 votes in favor and 29 against the implementation of an initiative that is included in the road map that the ANC militants approved in the general assembly of the last year. A good part of the wayward people are not opposed to its creation, but they do affirm that the presentation makes it clear that before carrying out this option, the Assembly should analyze its convenience and study options. A civic list without the ANC defining a clear course of confrontation with the State is blank, critics reason.

On the other hand, the pro-government sector accuses this group of acting according to the convenience of the political parties. And on Friday they released a statement in which they defended the democratic mechanisms of the organization.

It is not the first time that the Assembly has experienced a similar block resignation. At the end of 2020, seven members of the secretariat resigned, considering that the entity should explicitly support those pro-independence candidacies that openly declared themselves unilateralist in the face of the regional elections on February 14, 2021. The leadership of the ANC, which at that time Elisenda Paluzie was leading at the time, she saw her alleged transversality endangered and rejected this option. A month later, four more resigned.

The critics, grouped under the name of Indesinenter, have attended the meeting this Saturday with the intention of raising a question of confidence to its president, despite the fact that the statutes of the entity do not contemplate it. Also, a remodeling of its standing committee. None of this has been accepted. The result, the resignation of 13 members of the leadership and a vice president who steps aside.