The fear of being defeated by an ERC that will not even run with Oriol Junqueras as president has pushed Carles Puigdemont to resign from leading the JxCat candidacy for the Catalan regional elections on February 14.
The fugitive will occupy a symbolic place on the list, but will not lead it, with which the
postconvergent
candidate
will be settled in a primary with only two applicants: the Minister of Territory of the Generalitat,
Damià Calvet
, and the deputy in Congress ,
Laura Borràs
, who starts as a clear favorite.
«The Spanish repression prevents me from being the candidate for the Generalitat.
JxCat has to find a candidate who can participate in an investiture », has argued Puigdemont after verifying that he could not play the trick that allowed him to overcome ERC against all odds in the elections of December 21, 2017, those after the application of 155.
On that occasion, the fugitive promised that he would return to Catalonia to be invested if he won and the lure earned him the majority confidence of the independence movement, despite having sneakily escaped after unilaterally proclaiming independence while Junqueras was in prison.
He used the same electoral hook again in the European elections and once again managed to impose himself on his former vice president, without later daring to go beyond Perpignan.
That is why within JxCat there was a feeling that not even the very self-sacrificing Puigdemonist voter was going to swallow the same hook a third time.
Hence, sectors of the party -especially those closest to Laura Borràs- have pressed to designate an "effective candidate" before the start of the campaign.
That is, to present the true president of JxCat, the one legally capable of submitting to an investiture in Parliament in case of victory.
And they have obtained their objective.
In addition to the fear of being defeated by the ERC candidate technocrat,
Pere Aragonès
, Puigdemont's decision is motivated by another fear, that of being detained to render accounts before the Spanish Justice.
And it is that in the event that he had won the elections, the former president of the Generalitat could only stand for the investiture if before he resigned his seat in the European Parliament to become a member of Parliament, which would lead him to lose immunity that, pending the resolution of the request, grants freedom of movement throughout the rest of Europe.
Puigdemont ruled out, the fight between Borràs and Calvet seems,
a priori
, uneven.
The congressional deputy has much greater internal support and has the public support of the disabled Quim Torra;
while the main endorsement of the councilor of the Generalitat is the prisoner
Jordi Turull
.
Against Borràs only plays his desire to relieve Puigdemont at the top of the list, a fact that has greatly annoyed the former president, who however has not managed to mobilize other candidates of his liking, such as the Minister of Digital Policies, Jordi Puigneró , which finally will not attend the primaries.
The judicial case opened against Borràs for splitting cultural contracts during his time as a senior official in the Generalitat is not seen as JxCat as a burden, but as a new opportunity to place a martyr at the head of the Generalitat and pay for the speech of the « intelligent confrontation "against the" oppressive "state that overthrew Puigdemont and Torra, and which, when the day came, could do the same with Borràs.
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Jordi Turull
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Catalan Elections
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