Junqueras and Godàs avoid hand-to-hand combat in the only debate of the candidates to lead ERC | News from Catalonia

The only debate between the three candidates to lead Esquerra was reduced this Tuesday to practically an exchange of speeches, with white gloves, between the representatives of the two lists with the most options, Oriol Junqueras (Militància Decidim) and Xavier Godàs (Nova Esquerra Nacional). . Not even the frontal attacks of the other candidate, Helena Solà (Foc Nou), towards her two rivals managed to dynamite an obvious commitment to maintaining a contained tone. The controversy over the Maragall posters and the pacts with the PSC dominated the meeting in which Junqueras once again avoided revealing what he voted for in the internal consultation on the investiture of Salvador Illa.

The path to the Republican Congress this Saturday, derived from the crisis of the party that exploded in June after the poor electoral results, has been full of attacks and reproaches from both sides. A fratricidal fight that has had as its center the end of the tandem between Junqueras and his former number two Marta Rovira. That tension, however, did not appear in the debate, marked by calls from all parties to join forces after the vote.

Although Nova Esquerra Nacional’s main claim is the need to change the faces of the leadership to face the new political stage, Godàs avoided putting it on the table directly. It was Solà who directly questioned Junqueras’ continuity at the head of the party, just at the moment when the former vice president asked for a party that “embraced peasants.” “I admire you and appreciate you, but you have been president for 13 years. These facts [en referencia al escándalo de los ataques de falsa bandera y la caída electoral] “They have happened when you have been president,” he snapped.

Godàs took advantage of the open gap in the tone of the debate to try without success and without insisting that Junqueras reveal what he had voted for in Illa’s consultation. And he took the opportunity to criticize him for the fact that his tone and proposal were more typical of a candidate for president of the Generalitat and not a party leader. “I feel responsible [de lo sucedido] when I have been in fullness [del cargo]. I feel less responsible for things when that has not been possible. We have to be able to sew, because there is no one left over,” Junqueras said.

There came the only moment with something describable as tension. When criticized for not wanting to reveal the meaning of the vote in the consultation and interpreting it as a sign of bad leadership, Junqueras chose to return to the personal realm. “I hope you don’t spend four years in prison,” he said and later received signs of recognition for accepting criminal responsibility for holding the 1-O referendum. At other times, the candidate to repeat the presidency also launched some darts against the previous Government, headed by Pere Aragonès, criticizing the universality of the school voucher.

The former vice president and Solà also joined together on several occasions to blame Godàs, whose candidacy Marta Rovira and Pere Aragonès support, for the cartel scandal. Godàs responded by ensuring that he trusted the ERC’s internal control instruments, to which he asked for speed in their investigation, and disgraced Junqueras for not trusting structures that were put in place during his presidency. Solà, taking advantage of the fact that her candidacy does not have any representative in the current leadership, established herself as the true guarantee that the bottom of the facts will be reached and even made it her first task if she is elected to “apologize” for the scandal.

Given Junqueras’ commitment to wanting to show himself as a presidential candidate and to spend his time reflecting on issues such as housing or the crisis derived from the drought, Godàs tried to focus his shot on the need for ERC to focus its speech within the framework of the left and the independence. Solà, once again, played the card of being the outsider and showed a poster showing the curve of Republican vote decline in the last electoral cycle. “When we put independence on hold we began to lose votes,” he stated.

The Foc Nou candidate also took the opportunity to mark territory on another of the issues that has focused reflection on the future of ERC: the pacts with the socialists. “There will be no more investiture in the Congress of Deputies unless there is a vote on the referendum,” he assured, thus rescuing the more possibilist path defended by the party after 2017. Junqueras and Godàs, for their part, focused their proposal on the need to fulfill the commitments already made and threaten that Executives will fall if that does not happen.