Carles Puigdemont closed the political congress that Junts per Catalunya held from Friday to Sunday in Calella (Barcelona) with a telematic speech from Belgium. The intervention of the party leader, now official leader because he has been elected president to replace Laura Borràs, has appealed to the need to mobilize all available troops to relocate the party to some level of power: “Let’s go on the offensive,” said Puigdemont this Sunday, who has fresh in his memory his setback to regain the presidency of the Generalitat. Junts also does not rule in any of the large Catalan capitals and only controls the Provincial Council of Girona. Puigdemont has made a call to occupy “the centrality” of the Catalan political space and has asked to continue looking outside the windows of the party: “We need to open the party more,” he said.
The former president has been appealing for months to the need to turn Junts into a “cross-cutting” space for the independence movement, not even at the expense of relegate from decision-making positions to figures who had shown a powerful commitment to the party. In public, Puigdemont has no answer and no one has dared to present an alternative list to the one he and Jordi Turull, re-elected general secretary, commanded. However, only 43% of the membership has voted to ratify the new leadership of the party. Junts had given its bases the possibility of voting electronically.
The Junts political congress has been held to coincide with the last weekend of October, seeking a nod to the staging that took place in the Parliament in 2017 to approve a resolution that called for declaring the independence of Catalonia and opening a constituent process. This Sunday marks seven years since that. And soon it will be seven months since the day that, during the electoral campaign for the Catalans on May 12, Carles Puigdemont announced that if he did not win the presidency of the Generalitat he would withdraw from the foreground of politics: “I cannot do active politics if I do not have the responsibility of the presidency,” he said then.
Puigdemont, who is still waiting to benefit from the amnesty law, has offered a speech in a measured tone before his faithful, he has spoken for barely a quarter of an hour, but he repeated one of the reflections that he has used in recent times: “now it is our turn coming out of winter quarters.”
The political message was sent by Jordi Turull, when he said that “the PSOE has to comply with the agreements” if it does not want to suffer due to lack of support in the Congress of Deputies. “”We are not married to anyone, we are going to wrinkle ourselves,” said the secretary general.
