Junts per Catalunya feels that political pressure is trying to crush it from all sides. On the one hand, in Catalonia the polls predict a rise of the extreme right-wing pro-independence group Aliança Catalana, which would tie with Carles Puigdemont’s party in third place in a hypothetical election. And on the other hand, his key role in Congress, with seven deputies that allow for majorities, places him at the crossroads of continuing to support the Government of Pedro Sánchez or joining the PP and Vox bloc to force a motion of censure. On Friday, the leader of the popular parties, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, visited the Catalan employers’ association Foment del Treball and asked them to help overthrow the coalition government. The general secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, wanted this Saturday to get rid of the pressure in the party’s National Council and returned Feijóo’s message: “He has the audacity to come to Catalonia to ask for help from businessmen. He does not have to ask businessmen for help, but for forgiveness, for the systematic mistreatment to which he subjected them during the years when they were in the Government.”
During his speech, Turull insisted on the need for the party to avoid succumbing to pressures, both internal and external, from the position expected of Junts in Congress. Turull has instead opted to maintain a clear course, and has presented the party as the real alternative to the socialist Government of Salvador Illa: “There is pressure, a media wave towards Junts that is increasing. They want us to take shots at the wheel, but we are the alternative, not from the noise but from the proposal.”
Turull referred first to the break with the PSOE, which materialized at the end of October, although this has not led Carles Puigdemont’s party to support an alternative as Feijóo asks them to do. “After several warnings to the PSOE, we terminated the Brussels agreement. It was an opportunity but not even international mediation helped, the PSOE did not take it seriously. We do not have the vocation to be anyone’s crutch or to be part of any bloc. Stability depends on progress, and if there is none, we terminate the agreement,” Turull concluded. However, he is not against the Government either, which he sees in a situation “of fragility, without a majority, and bogged down in judicial issues with many doses of lawfarethe same one that they denied existed in Catalonia.”
Far from the motion of censure
The alternative to being with the Government would be to support a hypothetical motion of censure in case the popular ones raise it, but Turull has ruled out this possibility, by demanding that Feijóo apologize to the businessmen, and has listed the reasons: for having made it easier in Barcelona for the socialists to reach the mayor’s office, for the boycotts against Catalan products and the Catalan language, for the lack of investment in infrastructure and, ultimately, for “the mistreatment” to which the PP governments They subjected Catalonia and its businessmen for years, according to Turull. Businessmen want serenity and predictable scenarios, and that is why the first thing the president of the Catalan employers’ association, Josep Sánchez Llibre, did when Junts broke with the PSOE, .
For Junts to join the PP and Vox bloc would be one of those coups that are demanded of them from the outside. But there is another turn of the wheel that presses them more, from within, and that is to confront the surveys, “which have biases that cause shame, but which describe a very complicated moment, not only for Junts but for everyone,” Turull said. The general secretary has defined Aliança Catalana, which he has not named directly, as “the starkest populism that offers easy solutions to deep problems.”
“Catalonia cannot fall into an exclusive project that bases its proposal on hate, fear and division,” said Turull, despite the fact that pressure from Sílvia Orriols’ party has forced Junts for these voters who are tempted by the extreme right. “Junts was not born to renounce or to divide or to hate. Junts was born to build, to propose a national and social project outside of fashions and noise, with an eye on the future. Ours is positive independence,” said Turull.
The secretary general has thus opted to avoid “distractions” and focus on the proposals, and has predicted that the setback predicted by the polls —— will not come into effect when the moment of truth arrives. “Catalan politics has shown too many times that today’s polls do not represent tomorrow’s reality. Junts has a force that many want to ignore, and it also resurfaces when the country needs it. We have never accepted, and we will not do so today, that the future of Catalonia is dictated to us from outside,” he said.
