After three days of confinement in a law office in Barcelona, the negotiating teams of the PSC, ERC and ICV gave the green light 20 years ago to the “Agreement for a Catalan and left-wing government.” Pasqual Margall, Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira and Joan Saura solemnly signed the agreement on December 14, 2003 at the Saló del Tinell. The agreement put an end to 23 years of CiU governments and opened a new stage that in today's light left a strong mark on Catalan, and also Spanish, politics. That tripartite drew future scenarios, there were successes and mistakes.
Artur Mas had won in seats in the November 2003 elections, but the leftist formations could add up and form a government. After Pasqual Maragall emerged victorious over Jordi Pujol in 1999 but failed to form an alternative, the foundations had been laid to build a left-wing coalition. The PSC had lost seats, while ERC and ICV gained strength.
“The Tinell pact was a radical change after 23 years of pujolismo – says Joan Puigcercós, former secretary general of ERC and one of the leaders who was in the engine room of the agreement -, a change in democratic hygiene that allows for a turn from the center left to the country with a paradigm shift in the social model; education, health, neighborhood plan….. In addition, the arrival of a million immigrants was faced in a few years.” Social policies indicated a line of navigation but it was above all the elaboration of a new Statute that marked the future of the tripartite, and the story in Catalan and Spanish politics.
With the Tinell pact, explains Jaume Badia, who was director of Analysis and Foresight in the Government, ERC moderated its most pro-independence impulses to pivot on the axis of the left, and so that Catalonia would stop being in the hands of the usual families. . According to Puigcercós, the PSC was able to take another step in the advancement of self-government, and part of socialism destigmatized the independence movement.
But it is the competition unleashed between ERC and CiU in the preparation of the Statute that derails the government, according to the opinion of socialists and republicans. Artur Mas, remembers Badia, had been left out of the government and CiU, without the shelter of power, understood that it could not let the advance of self-government have the PSC, ERC and ICV as its authors.
Therefore, a struggle begins with the republicans that causes the nationalists to jump towards sovereignty, says Badia. And this wears down the PSC. A bid that was also a relevant element years later in the process.
The Maragall Executive began its journey when there was little coalition culture in the country. Former president José Montilla – one of Tinell's main negotiators – recalled in an interview in the Arxiu Pasqual Maragall – that this lack of culture in the coalition both in politics, in society and in the media caused “any dissonance was amplified.” Dissonances that earned the Government the title of Dragon Khan.
In a context, furthermore, in which CiU and its entourage exerted enormous pressure to derail the tripartite government. Shortly after the agreement was signed, in January 2004, vice president Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira met with ETA in Perpinyà, and a month later he had to resign. From the PSOE, where José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was facing the general election campaign, misgivings began.
On December 14, 2003, José María Aznar governed Spain with an absolute majority. CiU had voted in favor of his investiture. It is in this situation that the addendum that was introduced in the Tinell Pact must be read, in which the signatories committed themselves not to establish “any stable governance agreement” with the PP. From the socialist environment it is considered that with this decision ERC wanted to bill CiU for its pact with the PP.
The Government recognized shortly afterwards that the decision to isolate the PP was a mistake. “In 2003 a cordon sanitaire could not be established,” indicates the socialist environment two decades later. But the “Tinell pact” still resonates today in the speeches of the Popular Party. Daniel Sirera, who was then speaker in the Parliament, considers that “the beginning of the process and the economic decline of Catalonia” has its roots in Tinell. What it meant, he says, was a stigmatization of the PP “giving rise to Catalonia being a place where some have rights, and others do not. It excluded, he emphasizes, a democratic political force. A decision that, for Sirera, connects with the current situation and the attempt to prevent the PP from accessing institutional power.
Maragall tried to correct that course by opening negotiations with Josep Piqué about the Statute. But politics rushed at the start of 2004. On March 14, three days after the 11-M attacks in Madrid, Zapatero won the general elections. The PP, knocked out, begins from the opposition the construction of a harsh strategy based on the attack on the Statute and the Government of the Generalitat.
Pasqual Maragall's objective was to improve the fit of Catalonia in the Spanish State, to achieve a more comfortable and stronger relationship. This is how Joan Saura explained it (interview Arxiu Maragall 2016) and this was not possible for the PP, "but also for the PSOE." There was no minister who defended the federalizing Spain that was proposed and one of the big problems, he indicated, was that many PSOE leaders preferred an agreement with CiU. In January 2006, Zapatero and Mas signed the statutory agreement at the Moncloa. A disloyalty read from the left-wing government. Four months later, Maragall dismissed the ERC councilors for their refusal to support the Statute, and the first tripartite came to an end.
Some of the paths that were undertaken 20 years ago continue to this day, although nuanced by time, and with the subsequent impact of the process. In Spain, a left-wing coalition governs whose president did not win the elections. Reflections are opened on a tripartite future in Catalonia. Others review the consequences of those policies of harassment of the Catalan government. What was, what could be. And the PSC regrets that in 1999 a left-wing government could not be formed, with more weight of the socialists in seats. And with a stronger Maragall.
