Profile | Junqueras, the eternal candidate for ‘president’ | News from Catalonia

He is a man of faith. And he refuses to think that he sacrificed himself gratuitously. Oriol Junqueras believes that, if he sacrificed himself by going to prison, there must be a humane and fair counterpart, a gesture of affection that would fill his existence with meaning: obtaining the grateful vote of the Catalans to be president of the Generalitat.

At the moment, it doesn’t seem like things are going that way. According to the latest survey by the Center for Opinion Studies – the Catalan CIS – only 17% of Esquerra voters want Junqueras to lead the Government. In other words, after returning with the tables of the law from Mount Sinai, after spending three years and almost eight months in prison (of the 13 years to which he was sentenced), Junqueras tries to recover a people who are tired of the process and given over to paganism (54% of Catalans are now against independence). For this reason, he seeks the complicity of those who trust in him, beyond the partisan corset. “People love me and applaud me when I go to events,” the leader comments to those close to him.

Although he intends to transcend the party, as president of ERC he has always maintained tight control over all the decisions of his formation. He exercised his authority even from the Lledoners prison. There it was easy to see him dealing with the leaders of his formation, who always remained faithful to him. However, now, during Esquerra’s campaign for the presidency, he has presented himself as a man who was unable to fully exercise his duties while behind bars. His opponents deny this and, furthermore, assure that he was even aware of the false flag campaigns carried out by the party, such as that of Ernest Maragall, the Republican candidate for mayor of Barcelona, ​​whom some posters presented as suffering from Alzheimer’s. like his brother and former president of the Generalitat Pasqual – or the appearance of a doll with his own face that appeared hanging on a bridge in Sant Vicenç dels Horts, town of the one who was mayor Junqueras.

Playing the martyrdom card of victim of repression has been one of his constants in this campaign for the presidency of ERC, perhaps the result of his strong religious convictions. “Junqueras is leftist, but his Christianity carries a lot of weight,” says a party leader. It is curious that the formation, which historically counted among its voters and sympathizers numerous Freemasons, is now led by a Catholic who had afternoon leave to access the secret archives of the Vatican for two summers, no less than under the pontificate of the conservative Karol Wojtyla. He investigated the role of the ecclesiastical hierarchy during the War of Succession. While Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – later pontiff – made the machinery of the former Holy Office operate at full capacity, Junqueras spoke with him about football, since the Bavarian prelate was a Bayern enthusiast and, the leader of ERC, a Barça enthusiast. Friendly topics, then, while the dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith ―under the orders of Ratzinger― interrogated and sanctioned progressive theologians and prelates and, therefore, suspected of being little addicted to Wojtylian orthodoxy, such as Leonardo Boff, Gustavo Gutiérrez , Pere Casaldàliga or Edward Schillebeeckx, among many others.

Junqueras’ fidelity to the ecclesiastical institution is crisis-proof, since he even – according to party sources – maneuvered to soften the harsh sentences that were approved by Catalan parliamentary bodies against cases of pedophilia in the Catholic Church. This orthodoxy is attested to by the sidelong approach with which a politician capable of speaking about Saint Irenaeus, the Council of Carthage or the Judaizing Ebionites approaches the apocryphal gospels.

His new drift, his particular fall from the horse, like that of Saul of Tarso, came with the declaration of independence in 2017, when he was vice president of the Generalitat and pressured the president to make it effective. “He and Carles Puigdemont have since undergone a parallel transformation. The declaration of independence was a failure: one went into exile in Brussels and the other went to prison… but since then both believe that they have a special relationship with the people, they feel like mosaic figures with the strength to catalyze the country behind them. And that happened at one point; Not now,” says a historic leader of Esquerra. As proof of this attempt to catalyze Tyrians and Trojans in his person, during a recent debate between the candidates to preside over ERC, Junqueras refused to explain whether he had voted for or against making the socialist Salvador Illa president of the Generalitat, despite having given the green light to this operation.

There was a time when everything was possible. Junqueras took Esquerra to the highest levels of power in his mandate as president, a position that he has now revalidated but that he already held between 2011 and 2024. This 55-year-old Barcelona native and history professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​who resigns scripts written when he speaks from parliamentary lecterns, he has seen how his party went from leading the Generalitat to being the third political force, which he largely attributes to the absence of strong leadership like yours topping the list. The man who, a few days before being pardoned, in 2021, recognized that the only way to independence is the negotiation that leads to the Scottish model, because other paths are not “viable or desirable”, has not been able to renounce the role that he exercised in the past. As if political errors had, like the Golem of Prague, a life of their own.