Bronca in Madrid, coldness in Barcelona | Catalonia

Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and Junts per Catalunya, the two partners of the Catalan Government, experienced a new day of their continuous political anger on Wednesday. This time in a very peculiar way. Two Chambers – the Congress of Deputies in Madrid and the Parliament in Barcelona – and two diametrically different attitudes. In the Cortes, the spokesmen Gabriel Rufián (ERC) and Laura Borràs (JxCat) reproached themselves in a hand-to-hand confrontation during the debate on the extension of the state of alarm. In the Catalan capital, the coldness of here-nothing-happens marked the session.

The two independence parties seem to have chosen to turn Congress into their bad House, the platform where to concentrate the toxic discussion of ill-matched marriage and in a long pre-campaign. The maneuver seeks to leave the Govern and the Parliament apart from its continuous clashes. Fighting in Madrid does not wear off as much as doing it in Barcelona, ​​and historically everyone has gone their own way in the Cortes.

The spirits between both had been loaded since the weekend, when ERC made public that yesterday it would abstain in the last extension of the state of alarm. The Republicans came to oppose it twice and the change was facilitated by a pact with the Government to, among other things, guarantee the recovery of competition in Health during the third phase of the lack of confidence and “co-management” of European funds for the pandemic. . The President of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, and the spokesperson for Junts in Congress, Borràs, did not hesitate for a second to charge against the agreement, saying that it did not compromise the Govern.

Both Torra and the leader of ERC and vice president The Catalan Executive, Pere Aragonès, tried on Tuesday to give an image of unity in the first joint photo after the start of the pandemic. Both avoided referring to the political storm and the thorny issue of electoral progress in Catalonia was not even addressed in the brief press conference after the presentation of the committee of experts that will help the Generalitat in the post-covid-19 scenario. But the attempted truce was broken by both sides. Republican leaders such as Parliament President Roger Torrent again publicly advocated the election. Yesterday, in an interview in Catalunya Ràdio before the plenary session of the Congress, Torra insisted: “People will not understand today’s vote.” Then he accepted that the legislature “has no political track record” and said that it will call the elections once the way out of the crisis is “on track”.

Rufián took advantage of his time on the lectern to charge against Junts’ attacks on his agreement with the PSOE. “ERC speaks and decides ERC. From Brussels to Martorelles, passing through Congress and Parliament, “he said. “We are not anyone’s maid.” And he touched the fiber that hurts most in the neoconvergents: pujolismo. “I am not aware that Jordi Pujol was an independentist. We do. Or that it was on the left. We do. Nor that we have invested Aznar. Convergence, yes, ”he added.

Undated elections

In his turn to reply, Borràs, who equated ERC with Ciudadanos for their support in overtime, criticized Rufián for his tone. “His speech is unnecessary and offensive, and he looks more to the past than to the present,” he said. Junts insists on wanting to show the Republicans as the culprits that there is no unity in the independence movement for not sharing his idea of ​​confrontation with the State. ERC will have to decide shortly if it supports Borràs’ request for prosecution for various corruption crimes, something that would undoubtedly reopen the wound.

In the Parliament the climate was different. In the control session in Torra, the president of the ERC group, Sergi Sabrià, only alluded to the need to go to one. “We have to make things happen. And, in general, they spend better working and agreeing than not with reproaches, ”he said. Torra did not flinch.

No group brought up the issue of the elections, which Torra continues without calling despite having announced it in January. It was his own president who mentioned the subject during his argument that Catalonia “lacks resources and sovereignty”. “Why don’t I want elections? Because I want to make decisions ”, he justified.

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