“I voted the same as Bildu in Congress and I was called a botifler and Matute a statesman”

Was Donald Trump expected to win in the United States?

– I was expecting it. For a long time, the far right has dominated a power that is more powerful than the executive, judicial or legislative power, which is the digital power. And Trump, Meloni, Ayuso and Abascal dominate this power. The left must do some thinking in this regard. There are many people who consume, through a screen, a reality that does not exist.

Is this digital power being seen now, for example, with the DANA disaster in Valencia?

— That all the faces of the peninsula are there or have been there is not free. Autonomous powers belong to the autonomous government and this is pointed out by the government of Mazón. But the right and the ultra-right are already trying – and will try even harder – to create confusion so that it looks like everyone is guilty. It is the famous all are equal.

What do you think Mr. Feijoó will do?

— Amortize Mr. Mazón.

Will Sánchez take advantage of this tragedy so that everyone approves his budgets?

— I find it logical that the PSOE and Sumar try to get these budgets approved, taking advantage, in quotation marks, of this tragedy. The scene changes. This does not mean that the Left has to approve these budgets, but it is also not lost on anyone that, for example, there is a fair funding agreement for Catalonia, which also goes, in some way, through these budgets. There is a tragedy that goes with these budgets. The scene changes, and anyone who says otherwise is completely ignorant of reality. Now, the Left will have to listen and negotiate.

You, who know Mr. Errejón personally, how did you feel when you heard the news?

— Like everyone who works in Congress. I know that nobody knows what anybody does when they leave there, their personal life. With Errejón we never had a personal relationship beyond the professional, the political. And like any other job where you spend long hours, everyone talks about everyone. But if any of us had known that someone was committing a crime, they would have reported it. Now it is necessary to accompany the victims and do a deep reflection on how it is that there are people who take advantage of their power or their position to abuse.

And that this happens left and right.

– Exactly. I don’t really care if this affects matches. It affects us all and I have the feeling that at a given moment you fuel even more the role of anti-politics. And that we are all equal.

Do you see Pedro Sánchez touched by everything that is happening?

— Sometimes I make this comparison with Real Madrid in the Champions League. Until the 95th, or 100th, or 110th minute you don’t have to give it up. In the case of Pedro Sánchez, like it more or less, he always has a seventh life. The PSOE takes advantage of this bad pessimism, but whoever compares or says that a PSOE-Sumar government is the same as a PP and Vox government, has no idea.

And do you think anyone defends this?

— The Catalan independence right, which sooner or later, directly or indirectly, will make Feijóo Spanish president under three premises, all three false. The first is that the PP and the PSOE are the same. Two, that “I am Catalonia, and since I am Catalonia, it doesn’t matter to me”. And three, that Feijóo, at least, controls the judges.

Junts says that he is not part of any majority and that is why he sometimes votes with PP and Vox.

— Yes, with the excuse of competences. But when Junts votes against regulating rents, it does not do so because of a matter of jurisdiction, because it also did so in the Parliament of Catalonia. He does it for an ideological matter. For a long time we were accompanied by a Catalan right that, for whatever reason, shared the initiatives and stories of the pro-independence left. Now this is breaking. And this blog is getting closer and closer to what its history is, which is the PP.

From some voices in Junts what is being said is that Esquerra is no longer pro-independence.

— This is like the “in exchange for nothing”. One of the sins we have committed is not going out to kill, figuratively speaking, every time someone from the Catalan right lied about it. We had a person like Oriol Junqueras sentenced to 13 years in prison for a referendum, in prison for 4 years, like many others, and passing unequivocally social laws, and we felt that we were not enough independent and that we voted for nothing. And we kept quiet. Mainly from Catalonia. It was a pretty beastly original sin. And I’ve felt quite alone. I remember that when I came back from the meetings in Madrid and went to the executive or permanent offices of Esquerra, I was hallucinating. And I said, but listen, don’t you watch TV?

Precisely the issue of the party’s communication has been one of the great controversies of the last few months, especially after the ARA revealed that there was a structure B to carry out counter-campaigns. Did you know this structure?

— Throughout my career I have been outside the dynamics and life of the party headquarters. I will not criticize or badmouth any teammate because I have a lot of respect for them. For example, Sergi Sabrià has been my campaign manager during four electoral campaigns. He never told me about doing any of this and I refer to the facts. With our fights and problems, I must say he was an excellent campaign manager. If this happened, which it seems to have happened, the only thing I can say is that whoever is responsible should explain. Our people, aside from knowing the truth, what they don’t want is for us to kill each other in the public square.

But that’s what happened until very recently.

— If I have remained silent during all this time, it is because I am the spokesperson of a very diverse parliamentary group, where there are people from different candidacies. And because whatever I say, I have been very aware for a long time, that here in Catalonia it will be manipulated. A lot of people who are in different candidacies are very helpful and I have friends that I want with me. I understand that the Left must be diverse and I aspire to be the majority party in my country, so it must try to appeal to everyone. There must be people close, ideologically, to Junts, to the commons and to the PSC, because that makes us great. Many people envy this diversity of the Republican Left. If we have Tardà, Maria Dantes, or Ridao, Joan Capdevila or Pilar Vallugera, it gives us brutal ideological and electoral power. We must understand that we are an orchestra in which everyone must play their instrument harmoniously.

But the question is who is the conductor of this orchestra. You argue that it should be Oriol Junqueras, who has already been president of the party for 12 years. Why?

— I do not find any compelling reason for someone who has been and is, repeatedly, the most valued politician in the country, who has been in a cell for four years to defend the freedom of his country and who has a capacity of interpellation and to build a bridge with other political spaces such as Oriol Junqueras, I should not be the one who has the opportunity to preside over my party and, in factto preside over my country one day.

But then no one should be responsible for the bad electoral results of the last election?

— Everyone, but you also need to understand the context, which is very fucked up. There are many people in our country who say that the Basques know how to do it and we don’t. Basques vote, say and do exactly the same as us. Bildu even votes for more things in the PSOE than we do. And he’s doing well. Because no one tells Otegi that he is a traitor. no one In other words, we too must be able to report that in our country there is deep media toxicity. Just like in Spain, huh?

But is this toxicity he says media or political?

— I voted the same as Bildu in Congress and I have been called a botifler and Matute a statesman. It is not normal for me, for example in Atocha, to be told to slow down, because “you have Sánchez at your feet”, and to arrive in Sants and be called a traitor.

There may be someone who thinks that you are defending the candidacy of Oriol Junqueras because if he does not win his place in Madrid he is in danger.

— I have been a spokesperson for five years, I have breakfast, lunch and dinner for five years with probably innocent articles saying that they will kill me. So I’m used to it.

His second in the Congress group, Teresa Jordà, is in the other candidacy, Nova Esquerra Nacional.

— He seems to me to be an extraordinary person politically and he is one of the people who must continue, no matter what happens. We must believe that we must be diverse.

Therefore, you see no danger of breaking ERC?

— The diversity that exists within Esquerra does not exist in any other political space, simply what we need is to have leaders that are powerful. And also try to change the political and media network ecosystem that exists in this country. In the future it will be hard to understand that someone called Oriol Junqueras a traitor in the street. And that has only one answer, which is the deep poisoning that has taken place in this country.

But now they call him Carles Puigdemont too.

— Sometimes you create monsters that eat you.

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