Carles Puigdemont has given us permission to imagine the seven Junts deputies in Congress voting alongside the PP on ideological resolutions, overturning the State budgets or supporting a motion of no confidence 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 didn't dream of it. These are things that the former president of the Generalitat has said to Manfred Weber, the leader of the popular Europeans, and which Politico, the leading news outlet for the European institutions, has promptly reported.
Puigdemont's words ratify, perhaps unintentionally, a scenario we already knew. To face post-processing, Junts needed not one, but two runways. The one of an identity nature demanded paving in the form of an amnesty and it was not solely in their hands. It required that the PSOE wake up to the trance and rectify the cry of where I said white now I say black. The parliamentary arithmetic born on 23-J made this unexpected miracle possible.
For the second, which is being worked on since the ideological congress of the party in 2022, the tarring depends only on Junts. It is the track that should allow him to recover his bond with the more lukewarm conservatives, liberals, centrists and social democrats of the Catalan electorate. In other words, to differentiate openly from the left. A nationalist left that gained hegemony in Catalonia after the autonomous elections of 2015, when the CUP and ERC, with the blessing of Artur Mas and his step by the side, went on to compose the only music considered suitable for to be danced by the independentists.
Puigdemont explaining to Manfred Weber that his deputies may end up voting with the Spanish right is another step in the journey Junts is taking to balance the weight of the star with that of sectoral policies.
Last Friday's meeting with the leadership of the PNB in Euskadi, with Jordi Turull recalling at the exit that the PSOE pacts with Sumar do not bind Junts, is a not at all euphemistic way of reminding Pedro Sánchez that his will no longer be able to be the government most "progressive" in history. There are counterweights that aim to be active on the right. The efforts of the employer Foment to convey its economic program through Junts and the PNB, as reported by Manel Pérez in these pages, start from the same presupposition.
Together it makes efforts to stop being an aggregate of diverse people united only by the star. Puigdemont's threat to Pedro Sánchez through Manfred Weber is premature and not very credible in the short and medium term. But he draws the two-lane road along which he wants to travel his party more and more decisively. One lane for pro-independence proclamations and another to regain an own voice in taxation, education, health, security and the rest of the sectoral policies. The seed that was planted at the 2022 congress is slowly germinating.
The fight that Junts is experiencing in Parliament at the moment, with the majority of its deputies facing their colleague and second secretary of the Bureau, Aurora Madaula, obeys questions of this same nature. Madaula, who has also lost the trust of the joint president of the Parliament, Anna Erra, is active in a party that is no longer his.
To the extent that the estelada is now accompanied by an ideological program, the very left like Madaula are discovering that their positions and proclamations sound like Chinese to most of their colleagues. That deputy Madaula confuse the severe ideological discrepancy with the deputies of her own group - who openly discredit her and who demand her resignation as vice-president of Junts and from her position on the table of the Parliament - with bullying or gender violence it's nothing more than a poorly told joke. What is happening is that Junts is starting to be a political party with a desire for the centre-right and blind adherence to independence is no longer useful just to be comfortable with it. And of course, he's starting to have some people left over. Madaula is not the only one. Now even Manfred Weber knows.
