Don’t think about Laura Borràs, by Marçal Sintes


Together for Cataloniathe party founded a couple of years ago by Carles Puigdemont is a very young party, and also a new one, very little consolidated both doctrinally and in its strategy. In addition, the election, this June, of the tandem Laura Borràs -president- and Jordi Turull -general secretary- was made to get out of the way and gives off an inevitable aroma of provisionality. Borràs and Turull rose to the leadership of Junts after Carles Puigdemont resigned from the presidency to dedicate himself to the Consell per la República and Jordi Sànchez also left the general secretariat.

The cause of the lack of consolidation, of solidification, of Junts is twofold. On the one hand, the party brings together very heterogeneous groups of people from many different backgrounds. There are more radical people and more pragmatic people. There are people who don’t understand what a party is and people who know it perfectly. There are more liberal people and people from the center-left or even very left, etc. All this was brought together under the same umbrella that bore two printed names, one of its own and one common: Puigdemont and independence.

The second cause has to do precisely with Puigdemont. As he himself has admitted more than once, the ‘president’ has never felt comfortable with the rules and the functioning of the parties, which are highly formalized organizations. For this reason, JxCat was born, to add even more complexity, as a game that did not want to be a conventional game, but a kind of hybrid, cross between party and social movement. Trying to make Junts evolve and become a well-oiled machine was Sànchez’s objective, which he could not or did not know how to achieve.

As if that were not enough, Borràs -who was the presidential candidate for JxCat in last year’s elections- is waiting for trial against her for his management at the head of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes. She is accused of several crimes for having allegedly installment contracts to favor a computer friend of yours. The parliamentary regulations establishes (article 25.4) that: “In cases in which the accusation is for crimes related to corruption, the Bureau of the Parliament, once the act of opening the oral trial is final and is aware of it, must agree to the suspension of parliamentary rights and duties immediately […].

Borràs has actively and passively tried to convince each other that we are facing Another act of repression by the State against the independence movement. But neither the ERC nor the CUP seem to accept the arguments deployed by Borràs and, therefore, today, they are not willing to skip the regulation so that the President of the Parliament can continue in her position. In the case of Junts, it is uncertain what may happen. It must be assumed, however, that she will support her now president of the party and embrace the thesis of political repression. If this is so, and the ERC instead decides to apply the regulation, it is almost certain that the coalition cabinet blows up. In fact, this would not be a great displeasure for Borràs, who was the first to ask the Junts militancy to rule on whether to maintain or break the Government with ERC.

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Despite the obvious and immediate risk that this issue represents, the JxCat leadership devotes much less attention to it than might be expected. It certainly poses a very delicate threatand with many derivatives, even beyond the bankruptcy of the Government, for which the Borràs trial has become a kind of internal taboo. So much so, that neither between the leadership of the two ruling parties -Junts and ERC- has the problem been seriously addressed, nor is there any forecast on how to react when the oral trial actually opens.

Some of the more pragmatic leaders -many of them from the former Democratic Convergència- now curse that Jordi Turull agreed to agree with Borràs and rule out facing her in a primary. Given the votes that were given later when validating the agreed executive, they conclude that Turullista’s candidacy probably would have prevailed over Borràs’s, which would make this whole matter less cumbersome.


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