The general secretary of JxCat, Jordi Turull, has assumed that former president Carles Puigdemont will headline Junts in the Catalan elections on May 12. “We will go all out,” Turull assured. Puigdemont himself has avoided clarifying it from Strasbourg, at the headquarters of the European Parliament: “The day I make a decision on the matter, I will communicate it, naturally. With these keys that we have, everything is very premature,” he said. “I am in permanent contact with the leadership of my party, due to the negotiations we have at another level and due to the political moment that Catalonia is experiencing. We talk about everything. Also electoral scenarios on many occasions, but honestly, everything is very recent. We have not had time at this time to meet with my party yet,” he said. And then he slipped: “With the electoral calendar in hand I will be able to be present at the investiture debate.”
Junts per Catalunya had turned the demand for early elections and the complaint that the Catalan legislature had passed its expiration date into a kind of party motto. The head of the JxCat parliamentary group, Albert Batet, even addressed Pere Aragonès this Wednesday in the Parliament to demand an end to “the agony” and the calling of elections before exhausting the natural cycle of the mandate, in February 2025. Junts began calling for elections as soon as he left the Government, in October 2022, and has not lowered its tone at any time, despite not having defined which candidate can choose to compete for the Generalitat.
Turull has fired against ERC, maintaining that Aragonès’s electoral advance responds to “sectarianism” and “electoral calculation”, thinking that he could catch JxCat on the wrong foot and without a candidate. Junts is betting everything that the amnesty will take effect expressly. With Puigdemont in Belgium and with Turull himself still disqualified from standing in elections, the bouquet of possible Junts candidates withers if the amnesty is not activated before the summer. In the event that neither Puigdemont nor Turull could appear on the electoral poster, Junts has always had in the chamber the name of former councilor Josep Rull, a veteran of the party, with a Convergència gene, and who was also convicted by 1-O .
Puigdemont does not currently have any judicial impediment to running for office. He is not disqualified and retains the right to be elected, so he could head the Junts list for the Catalan elections on May 12 if the party so decided, just as he did in the 2021 elections, when he had already been there for four years. fled from Spanish justice. But the electoral advance announced this Thursday does have consequences for the former president. The first: it will prevent him, barring surprise, from campaigning in person in Catalonia, a possibility that would have been open if the elections had been held with the amnesty already in force.
The Government’s forecast is that the grace measure will be definitively approved in the second half of May. From then on, the courts will have two months to apply the rule. In the case of Puigdemont, it will be the Supreme Court that will have to decide whether to apply the measure of grace to the leader of Junts for the cause of the process and for the newly opened Democratic Tsunami. If the Supreme Court rejects the amnesty plan for Puigdemont, the former president He could not travel to Spain without risking arrest. But if he limits himself to submitting a query to the EU Court of Justice or the Constitutional Court about the law, Puigdemont will not be amnestied immediately, but he could not be detained either if he traveled to Spain. This possibility is what Junts was counting on when, last week, it scheduled Puigdemont’s return to Catalonia for the month of July. This scenario would have allowed the former president of the Generalitat to campaign in Catalonia if the elections had been held, as planned, at the beginning of 2025, but this is prevented by the early elections.
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The possibility also remains up in the air that, if he presents himself and has options to be invested president, can arrive in time to attend the investiture debate. That has been the goal that Puigdemont himself set this Wednesday when he stated that “with the electoral calendar in hand” he sees it as feasible to be present at the investiture debate. With the elections called for May 12, that possibility does exist, although it will depend on how the Supreme Court acts when applying the grace measure in the two cases it has open against the Junts leader. Because Puigdemont can be elected deputy without setting foot in Catalonia, as he was already in 2017 and 2021, but he cannot be appointed president of the Generalitat if he does not personally go to Parliament. This was determined by the Constitutional Court in January 2018, when the former president had been in Belgium for three months fleeing from Spanish justice and the Parliament even called a full investiture session to elect Puigdemont electronically without him having to be present in the Chamber. Catalan. The guarantee court provisionally vetoed this possibility and, subsequently, declared unconstitutional several articles introduced in the Parliament Law that provided for the remote election of the president of the Generalitat.
In the event that he has a chance of being elected head of the Government, Puigdemont will have another dilemma before him: access to this position requires him to resign from that of MEP, a position that, in addition to the European projection that the leader of Junts, gives him the protection of European immunity in the event that the application of the amnesty becomes complicated and the Supreme Court maintains the cases against him.
The scenario that Puigdemont faces is different from that of the leaders of the process who have already been tried and sentenced by the Supreme Court. Those who were sentenced for aggravated embezzlement, including former president Oriol Junqueras and Turull himself, are disqualified because this sentence did not diminish with the pardons. In the case of Junqueras, the disqualification extends until 2031, and Turull, until 2030. The amnesty would eliminate this penalty, but the electoral advance closes the door for the grace measure to arrive in time for these defendants.
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