In Esquerra they refuse to bury the habit of simultaneously looking in the rear-view mirror on the left – to see what advantage they have over the PSC – and in the rear-view mirror on the right to know how fast Junts per Catalunya is coming. And this despite the fact that both Salvador Illa’s team and Carles Puigdemont’s team have overtaken them. The socialists have taken control of the Generalitat and Junts has achieved the birthright of the independence movement. The Republicans are the third political force and, immersed in the process of electing the new leadership, the old ghosts emerge. ERC must overcome complexes. He has done so in practice, supporting the central government or making Salvador Illa president, but he refuses to bury them. “. Bildu already understood it,” Joan Tardà, veteran ERC leader, summarized to this newspaper.
While the new is not born, the old refuses to die in the heat of the fight to gain control of the party. There we would have to register the proposal proposed by the two contending currents Militància Decidim, the team of Oriol Junqueras and Nova Esquerra Nacional, of Xavier Godàs, for . And a good moment would be the budgets of the Generalitat for 2025. In reality, what the initiative seeks is to attract the votes of the Foc Nou current, the most inclined to the pact with Junts per Catalunya.
It is true that a no small part of what was agreed between PSC and ERC to make Salvador Illa president. It is also true that the agreements must be monitored to see their degree of compliance. And the pressure that Junts per Catalunya exerts on its former ERC partners is not negligible. But you cannot resort to that kind of continuous evaluation for purely domestic and internal purposes. The ERC militancy gave the green light last August to the . The socialist position undoubtedly weighed in the vote of the members with the application of article 155, but also the pardons, the judicially stranded amnesty and the awareness that with the right in power in Spain, this would have been unattainable.
In Esquerra they also kept memory that the president Pere Aragonès had to call early elections last spring when he did not find the support to approve his budgets in a move surely of tactics on the part of the PSC and the commons. ERC, like Ada Colau’s party, knows that its future, for better and worse, is now linked in Spain to the PSOE and in Catalonia to the PSC, the only left that seems to understand, like Giulio Andreotti, that it does not erode power, but not having it. Proof of this is how little it took the socialists to do so. What was once a condition sine qua non to approve the budgets of the Aragonès Government, with the Illa Government it is reversible. In a few days the Parliament will debate the increase from 10% to 55% of the tax on gambling and which was agreed upon at the time by PSC and the defunct CiU. This is a first step towards embarking on this project that a few months ago was capital for Catalonia. Sometimes not only junior partners but even socialists have to swallow toads. The PSC has given full force to the phrase attributed to the Count of Romanones: in politics “never” is until this afternoon.
The weather forecast recommends that the left achieve understanding in Catalonia and in the Congress of Deputies. Generosity and realism are essential in these times of reversible rights
