The convergent gene deciphered by Enric Juliana was the brainchild of Jordi Pujol. Carles Puigdemont’s is another, with common but different elements. We see. With Puigdemont’s help, the Catalan nationalist right managed to evict the socialists from the mayor of Girona in 2011, where the PSC had been in power for 32 consecutive years. Now, Junts per Catalunya, Puigdemont’s party, is on the verge of repeating that political success, but not by changing a municipal majority, but rather by overthrowing a Spanish government, the one formed by the PSOE and Sumar.
That municipal victory established Puigdemont as a leading figure of the Catalan nationalist right. It provided him with sufficient credentials to be the candidate of the pro-independence left-right coalition for the presidency of the Generalitat in 2015, at a time of acute political upheavals.
Since then, however, everything has gone wrong, completely wrong, for the pro-independence coalition. Puigdemont experienced defeat and exile. The sovereignist movement dissolved, his party lost the presidency of the Generalitat at the hands of the Esquerra Republicana, first, and then of the PSC, and since 2021 it has been out of the Catalan government. The only positive thing that Puigdemont has achieved after accumulating disasters is the pardon and amnesty with which Pedro Sánchez’s governments have tried to deflate Catalan politics.
But in politics everything can get worse and this is what Puigdemont is doing: now Junts wants to bring down the Sánchez government, even if it is the one that promotes nothing less than an amnesty for the independentists. To make it clear that this is true, Junts’ spokeswoman in Congress, Míriam Nogueras, wanted to distance herself from Sánchez by resorting to personal insults. Cynical and hypocritical, he defined him, after repeating the same series of accusations and curses that PP and Vox systematically dedicate to the president.
Puigdemont’s career includes being president of the Generalitat which proclaimed the republic in 2017 only to freeze it minutes later, but after eight years this is far from establishing him as a political leader. The opposite. All the independence rhetoric and inflammation have led to nothing except prison and discredit. On the other hand, his credentials as a right-wing politician continue to attract a large part of his followers. With the breakup of the pro-independence coalition with ERC and CUP, Puigdemont reaffirmed Junts’ alignment with the neoliberal right-wing parties already marked since the days of Artur Mas.
It also broke with the initial hallmarks of Convergència, which were a mix of Christian democracy, social democratic touches and the populism of Jordi Pujol so attractive to Catalan business. Now Junts is pledging to expose the fiscal hell, calling for the abolition of inheritance tax, calling for immigration to be curbed and demonstrating that he detests the PSOE and Sumar coalition.
There has always been a conservative element in CiU, but it was contained, limited by the need to cover a wider social sphere. This position has now become the dominant position of Junts and emerges clearly when its spokesmen show the great discomfort caused by having supported the investiture of Sánchez and the left-wing government of the PSOE with Sumar, whom they have detested since his birth.
No conversation, no negotiations, Míriam Nogueras announced to Sánchez. Paradoxes of life, Puigdemont’s party has become the executor of the policies of the PP and Vox and, if this continues, it is on its way to becoming their most effective instrument.
