Puigdemont’s strategy in the negotiation with the PSOE puts the stability of Junts in check

The negotiation by the Table of Congress is testing the elasticity of the waist of the progressive coalition and the ability to understand its potential partners, a squad of parties with different interests and where Junts per Catalunya has decided to pull hard on the rope. The formation commanded by Carles Puigdemont has concentrated the leading role at the cost of challenging the PSOE and Sumar. The fugitive Catalan ex-president in Brussels has chosen to personally design the tactic, restricting contacts to a small group of collaborators. Despite the urgency for the composition of the Board and the investiture, Junts has thrown on the table a package of demands that exceeds the political situation and that prioritizes designing a new framework for relations between Catalonia and the rest of Spain. In this way, he expresses the idea that he has little to lose, because it makes no difference to him to deal with a PSOE Executive than with one of the PP. However, a repetition of the elections would put the party before a gorge of uncertainties: it risks losing two seats that on 23-J it managed to retain by a narrow margin of votes, it multiplies doubts about the pardon of its president, Laura Borràs, and the current leadership of the formation is exposed to an internal shock to promote changes in the direction.

Junts does not feel responsible for a possible alliance of power between the PP and the far-right of Vox, and has turned warnings that eventual support for Pedro Sánchez will not be “in exchange for nothing” into a summer tune. The discretion with which the parties approach the negotiations by the Congress Table, the first step in what will happen later in the investiture, makes it difficult to know the starting price of the support. But even without specifying what he can gain in the deal, Junts does know in advance what he risks losing. The post-convergent formation has 7 seats, one less than those it won in 2019, when it went to the polls with the PDeCAT.

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The balance of 23-J was discreet for the Junts list, but it managed to save the blow because ERC suffered a bigger collapse. The Republicans also reached seven deputies, but had just achieved 13 in 2019. The apparent tie in the contest for the independence hegemony is in doubt if the blockade of the investiture ends up leading to what would be the third electoral repetition since 2016. In the constituency of Girona, the definitive scrutiny of 23-J ruled that the PP was less than 300 votes away from snatching a seat from Junts; in Tarragona, a difference of less than 1,000 ballots prevented the PSC from obtaining a third deputy, at the expense of the only representative that Junts obtained.

After knowing the results of 23-J, Jordi Turull declared that the distribution of seats left a “window of opportunity” for the Catalan independence movement to raise its voice in Madrid. Despite the fact that various Junts leaders (President Laura Borràs is the most paradigmatic example) feed the theory that the only way is open confrontation with the State, within the party a sector resists that feels comfortable with the possibility of having leading role and decision-making capacity in the gestation of the new Government. Taking advantage of negotiating and agreeing is something claimed by those who claim the benefits provided by the convergent strategy. CiU got to have 18 benches in the Congress in 1989, becoming the third political force.

“If this gift that he has given us ends in nothing for Catalonia, within Junts there will be a storm,” says a party official. Since Laura Borràs and Jordi Turull promoted the need to leave the Government of the Generalitat last October, the formation has seen its share of power progressively shrink. In Catalonia, Junts does not command any capital and only controls the Girona Provincial Council.

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The repetition of elections, moreover, would mean a new opportunity for a PSC on the rise to continue setting the pace in Catalonia and to reinforce the aspirations of Salvador Illa in an upcoming contest for the Generalitat. The Socialists swept the 23-J and were also the force with the most votes in the municipal elections in May. In the 2021 parliamentary elections, the PSC also won in votes, despite being tied with ERC for seats.

The amnesty of those prosecuted for causes related to the process is one of the conditions that Junts has advanced to give its support. The president of the party, Laura Borràs, defends that the judicial sentence that sentenced her to 4 and a half years in prison for cutting up public contracts to favor an acquaintance of hers is a case of malicious judicial persecution for her independence movement (lawfare, she calls it). . In March, when they sentenced her, the magistrates of the TSJC recorded in the sentence a proposal to the Government to grant a partial pardon to Borràs, arguing that an effective admission to prison may be disproportionate, taking into account the nature of the facts. The pardon is the power of the Government. “It is a flagrant case of prevarication, of misuse of public resources,” Pedro Sánchez said in March, when asked about the Borràs case, and avoided any commitment: “I think I have to be respectful of the procedure that our Rule of law”. That of the pardon is an uphill path, which could become steeper if the right and the ultra-right come to the command of the Executive.

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