Carles Puigdemont has given us permission to imagine the seven Junts deputies in Congress voting alongside the PP on ideological resolutions, overthrowing the State budget or supporting a motion of censure against Pedro Sánchez. This will happen, according to the former president of the Generalitat, if there is no progress in the negotiations with the PSOE on the points that allowed the investiture and which will begin to be discussed next Saturday in Switzerland. We have not dreamed of it. These are things that the former president of the Generalitat has said to Manfred Weber, the leader of the European Popular Party, and which he has promptly reported on in Politico, the leading news outlet for the European institutions.
Puigdemont's words ratify, perhaps unintentionally, a scenario that we already knew. To face the post-processing, Junts needed not one, but two landing strips. The identity-based one demanded paving in the form of an amnesty and it was not solely in their hands. It required the PSOE to come to terms with the bad situation and rectify itself to the cry of where I said, I say, I say Diego. The parliamentary arithmetic born of 23-J made this unexpected miracle possible.
For the second, which has been in the works since the party's ideological congress in 2022, the tarring does depend only on Junts. It is the clue that will allow him to recover his bond with the conservatives, liberals, centrists and lukewarm social democrats of the Catalan electorate. That is, openly differentiate oneself from the left. A nationalist left that won hegemony in Catalonia after the regional elections of 2015, when the CUP and ERC, with the approval of Artur Mas and his support, began to compose the only music considered suitable to be danced by the independentists. .
Puigdemont explaining to Manfred Weber that his deputies may end up voting with the Spanish right is one more step on the path that Junts is taking to balance the weight of the estelada with that of sectoral policies.
Last Friday's meeting with the PNV leadership in Euskadi, with Jordi Turull reminding at the exit that the PSOE pacts with Sumar do not bind Junts, is a far from euphemistic way of reminding Pedro Sánchez that his can no longer be the most “progressive” government in history. There are counterweights that aim to be active on the right. The efforts of the Foment employers' association to convey its economic program through Junts and the PNV, as Manel Pérez has reported in these pages, are based on the same presupposition.
Junts makes efforts to stop being an aggregate of various people united only by the estelada. Puigdemont's threat to Pedro Sánchez through Manfred Weber is early and not very credible in the short and medium term. But he draws the two-lane road along which he wants his party to travel in an increasingly determined manner. One lane for independence proclamations and another to recover one's own voice in taxation, education, health, security and the rest of the sectoral policies. The seed that was planted in the 2022 congress is slowly germinating.
The brawl that Junts is experiencing in the Parliament at the moment, with the majority of its deputies facing their fellow member and second secretary of the Board, Aurora Madaula, is due to issues of the same nature. Madaula, who has also lost the trust of the parliamentary president, Anna Erra, is active in a party that is no longer hers.
To the extent that the estelada is now accompanied by an ideological program, very leftists like Madaula are discovering that their positions and proclamations sound Chinese to the majority of their colleagues. That Congresswoman Madaula confuses the severe ideological discrepancy with the deputies of her same group – who openly disavow her and demand her resignation as vice president of Junts and from her position at the Parliament table – with bullying or gender violence is not more than a poorly explained joke. What happens is that Junts is beginning to be a political party with a preference for the center-right and only blind adherence to independence is no longer enough to feel comfortable there. And of course, there are starting to be some people left over. Madaula is not the only one. She now even knows it Manfred Weber.
