The parliamentary elections on May 12 will be a turning point for former president Carles Puigdemont, whatever the outcome of the polls. The leader of Junts promised yesterday to return to Catalonia, to the Parliament, for the investiture debate, whether he is the candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat or not. The elections will also determine his political future. If he is not sworn in as president, he will leave his seat and “active politics,” according to what he revealed yesterday, when he also announced that he will not act as head of the opposition in any case.
The early Catalan election has disrupted the plans of the former president, who was considering his return in the fall. With the regional elections on the near horizon, he has changed his initial forecast and has advanced his return, which has as an additional ingredient and backdrop the Amnesty law that Congress will definitively validate at the end of May, according to the current script. and the confidence of the former Catalan president that he will at least annul the precautionary measures such as the arrest warrants against him and other sovereigntist leaders. In this context, he affirmed that the Supreme Court's summons for the Democratic Tsunami protests of October 2019 will remain “wet paper.” “It doesn't worry me any more than the rest of the accusations from the last six and a half years,” said the leader about that case, in which he is accused of terrorism.
Likewise, the JxCat candidate also made it clear in an interview on RAC1 that he will not return during the electoral campaign, even if the approval of the amnesty allows it. “I will return to Catalonia on the day of the investiture debate. “It is an act more of a country than a party, outside the electoral context and with institutional meaning,” he noted after remembering that he left in 2017 as president dismissed by article 155 of the Constitution. The return, therefore, “cannot be an act at the service of an electoral strategy,” as a Junts candidate in the Catalan race, he later argued.
In the field of hypotheses and speculation about the results of 12-M, asked about the possibility that JxCat wins and the PSC makes an unnatural maneuver like that of the Barcelona City Council, adding the support of PP or Vox, Puigdemont ventured that “the PSC will know what to do” if necessary, issuing a warning about the stability of the central Government in the Lower House.
“What they did in Barcelona is legitimate, but it has a touch of betrayal, they told us otherwise hours before, and that now has consequences, the city does not have budgets,” Puigdemont said. “If they do, they will know. It would make very little sense for us to support the Government if its franchise in Catalonia tries to put a brake on the will of the Catalans," he later predicted, implying that they would not support the PSOE in Congress from now on in that scenario, without clarifying whether That will mean the end of the legislature.
In any case, the post-convergent leader stressed that they will not negotiate with the PSC. “It is up to them with their responsibility,” concluded the former president, who assured that he only wants to have a majority in Parliament if he is pro-independence. “I will not seek an agreement with the PSC and I do not believe that the PSC will seek one with me. There is no tripartite possible with us... Another thing is that we agree piece by piece, and we want to talk to everyone, but the parliamentary majority has to rest on a clearly pro-independence project,” he concluded.
From those words, although it was not said, it is deduced that in JxCat they expect the PSC to abstain if there is an agreement and the sum of Junts and Esquerra is close to the absolute majority, as has happened in the last legislatures. A different scenario would be that of a tripartite of socialists, republicans and commoners. Given that, there is nothing to object to in JxCat.
In relation to the electoral debates, which Junts has asked to be held in the south of France for Puigdemont to participate, the former president recalled that he meets with the PSOE in Switzerland. “Can't the PSC come to Perpignan?” He questioned before referring to the face-to-face meeting that Pere Aragonès requested. “Normally the president of the Generalitat is proposed face to face, he does not propose them,” said the former president, who did open himself to debate with Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
