The president tenses his face, presses his lips repeatedly and… “up to here”. The gesture is recurrent when Pere Aragonès' patience –ample but not infinite– reaches its end. Next to him, Jordi Puigneró raises his eyebrows. It's past eleven o'clock on Tuesday night and, he can't imagine it, but he will be the scapegoat to unleash the definitive crisis of the coalition between ERC and Junts. Audits, ultimatums, questions of trust... The president's anger evolves with the hours: "It's not me, it's contempt for the institution." It is the idea that he transferred to his collaborators before making such an unusual decision as the dismissal of the highest representative of his partner in the Government. Unusual and irreversible. Junts goes back to prick the bone.
The movement reinforces Aragonès but does not unclog the crisis. Junts has developed an unusual ability to maintain confusion among its own ranks to the point of unraveling the agenda for the fifth anniversary of 1-O. Today a commemorative act was to be held at the Palau de la Generalitat with interventions by Aragonès and Carles Puigdemont; Oriol Junqueras and Puignero. With them, the current ministers and those of 2017. The teams of the president and the former president had worked together until Tuesday morning, they maintain in the Government. The preparations stopped with the plenary session and the call was aborted on Thursday.
In that space of time, Puigneró had already unknowingly starred in the chronicle of an announced dismissal. On Tuesday, at the end of the usual meeting of the Consell Executiu, he took the floor and made a speech that some ERC ministers sounded like…. "Are you saying goodbye?" Although in ERC they thought that the one who would force his relief was Junts. At night in the Parlament, the ministers of Junts gathered around him in an empty hemicycle. The recess prior to Albert Batet's intervention led to a somewhat intimate scene. Violant Cervera hugged him; Josep Maria Argimon took off his jacket and joked with Jaume Giró; Lourdes Ciuró grouped them together to take a selfie while Puigneró remained seated. The photo does not exist. The mobile failed.
On Wednesday, like Aragonès, he canceled his agenda and –intuition?– dressed in a dark, solemn suit for the extraordinary meeting of the Consell Executiu. At the stroke of midnight he left the Palau de la Generalitat dismissed and leaving behind his vice president's office. The consolation of his companions came on a hotel terrace... The next day, before the party executive, he lamented emotionally about the "injustice" of his punishment and came to say that Oriol Junqueras had been a worse vice president with Carles Puigdemont. At the end of the debate in Junts, he considered turning it into an unusual bargaining chip with ERC. Junts would ask for his restitution as a condition to save the Government. The proposal stunned supporters of the coalition's continuity. "It's an impossible condition!", but ERC has been formally complained to and has been rejected as unserious.
Could the umpteenth twist in the Junts-ERC perpetual crisis have been avoided? The meeting of Aragonès and Turull in the Casa dels Canonges on Wednesday afternoon was about to put the conflict on track. Puigneró's dismissal had been in the ERC script for hours. The president had called an extraordinary meeting of the Government to formalize the "proof" of the "disloyalty" of the vice president. Puigneró admitted that he knew that Junts would raise a question of trust (it was one of the three options), although the final decision of the party's leadership had reached Batet via mobile phone, two rows above him in the parliament chamber.
The negotiation took a turn when Junts published a statement explaining that its ministers "unanimously" supported the proposal of the matter of confidence. Aragonès discovered it after two hours dealing with Turull, and there was no turning back. Already in his office in Palau, the president informed Puigneró that he would be dismissed. One last call from Turull before the president's appearance did not change things.
ERC does not give in and has been drawing and redrawing all the possible scenarios based on the post-convergence fluctuations, but for days they have been proposing a coexistence to Junts from outside the Government. A Junts but not scrambled. Josep Maria Jové did it a fortnight ago at the Palau de Pedralbes meeting and he did it again on Wednesday in the plenary session of the Parlament. "There are other ways..." In Pedralbes he even recalled that the precedent exists: 9-N was done with ERC outside the Government. Junqueras resisted but ended up volunteering at a table.
In ERC they admit that "life would be easier" with Junts in the Government, but the condition is to tie them short. Aragonès is not willing to extend his hand if the priority of his partners is not the stability of the Government, the recognition of authority and the legitimacy of his leadership. It was the president himself who conveyed to the ERC leadership that the situation was "unsustainable" and put the total rupture on the table. Even Junqueras was more tempered in the first contacts. He asked to "look long" and analyze the calendar. An electoral cycle begins and the socialists will take advantage.
Salvador Illa would celebrate a break that underpins his "reunion" strategy. The PSC does not want elections, it wants to stifle the pro-independence political offer, convert its alternative government into a deputy government of the ERC until the next elections. Yesterday he sat down with Minister Giró to inquire about the Generalitat's budget calendar. Will the draft law be approved before the government breaks up?
Junts planned a 72-hour negotiation with ERC on Thursday before formulating the question that he will transfer to his bases about the future of the Government. But the hours passed and the proposal with "specifications, guarantees and deadlines" on the fulfillment of the government pact did not reach Republican hands... When it arrived, it was a dead end. The rupture will not come out for free, neither in the Junts accounts, nor in the municipal polls, nor in the regional ones. Nor does it benefit ERC. The Republicans have managed to shield their strategy from foreign vicissitudes, but the polls are not good against the PSC. The noise has tarnished the general policy debate, the 300 million "social shield" and the "clarity agreement" proposal that the president wanted to champion. And even so, illustrious republicans warn: "the fate of Aragonès should not be underestimated".
