“In ERC, the group is more important than the leader. When the leader detaches himself from the group or the management, what he does is burden the leader”, analyzes the historian Joan Esculies. He considers that this is the tone of what has happened to ERC in the crises it has had throughout its history and sees similarities between the current situation and that of 2008. In the congress sixteen years ago, four candidacies faced each other, two of which had chances to lead the party. They were that of Joan Puigcercós, on the one hand, and that of Ernest Benach, on the other, who represented the sector of Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira. That appointment confirmed the breakup of the tandem that had led the party until then: Carod-Rovira as president – who decided not to run for re-election – and Puigcercós as general secretary.
“There was more political debate in 2008,” says one of the people who experienced that congress from the inside. However, the dispute between Puigcercós and Benach did not focus so much on the ideological issue, but rather the former contested Carod’s leadership because he considered that he had isolated himself from the party. The most strategic debate was with the two candidates critical of the management at that time represented by Joan Carretero, on the one hand, and Jaume Renyer, on the other. Both were opposed to pacts with the PSC at a time when the Republicans were part of the second tripartite party, but Carretero also distanced himself from the more left-wing ideological axis of the Republicans.
Pacts with the socialists were one of the issues that focused the strategic debate, as it is now. Foc Nou – and also Recuperem ERC, the candidacy of the critical current of the 1-O Collective which has not reached the minimum number of endorsements – is explicitly opposed to it and is presented as the alternative to the two official candidacies: the d ‘Oriol Junqueras, Militancia Decidim, and that of Xavier Godàs, New Esquerra Nacional. Like Esculies, the historian Josep Maria Solé Sabaté assures that the 2008 confrontation was not as bloody in public as the current one. “Now there is also a personal confrontation”, points out Solé. In 2008, there had been a break between Carod-Rovira and Puigcercós, like the one between Oriol Junqueras and Marta Rovira, but the personal clash was not aired as it is now, the two historians point out.
Puigcercós was the winner of the battle and, despite opening negotiations, the leadership he set up did not end up integrating any member of Benach’s candidacy – the other two rejected any agreement. They entered a new group of leaders such as Marta Rovira, Pere Aragonès, Laura Vilagrà or Núria Cuenca. The other result of the congress was the split first of Reagrupament, by the hand of Carretero, and then of Solidaritat, with Uriel Bertran. Esquerra faced a journey through the desert until 2011, when Junqueras and Rovira assumed the reins.
The Macià-Companys relationship
Already at its birth, the party was configured with different ideological currents, from the separatism of Francesc Macià to the republicanism and laborism of Lluís Companys, passing through the federalism of Josep Irla or the “more socializing” current of Joan Lluhí Vallescà , explains Solé. The collision between Macià and Companys in April 1931 made clear the two ideological sides that marked ERC in its beginnings. Companys went ahead and proclaimed the Republic, without specifics about Catalonia, from the Barcelona City Council, and this upset the Grandfather, who a little while later presented himself at the Palau de la Generalitat – then the seat of the Provincial Council Provincial – to proclaim the “Catalan Republic as an integral state of the Iberian Federation”. The ideological component that differentiated them was obvious, but there was also a certain distrust of Macià towards Companys. The then president of the Republicans sent Companys to the civil government to prevent him from being mayor of the city.
In those first years also comes the first split. It is that of the Opinió group – with people like Lluhí Vallescà, among others – who disagreed with the way Macià’s party was run and considered that it was “moving away from the founding values” of the formation, points out Esculies. With the death of Macià in December 1933, the crisis did not get any worse. Companys takes the reins of the party and with the outbreak of the Civil War, the party questions his strategy because they consider him “too aligned with the PSUC”, explains Esculies, but also because of how he organizes the rear guard, adds Solé. In 1940, already in exile, the party separated him from the more executive facet of the presidency of the Generalitat.
“During the Second Republic, the conceptual background is greater, the discrepancies are deeper in the ideological field”, points out Solé. Esculies agrees, who adds that in the Left of the 1930s there was a “broader palette of colors” because it was also a party that reached many more people, a catch-all. From the 80s, ideologically the party is “more homogeneous” and the differences are rather strategic and not so ideological. In the most recent history of the party, apart from the convulsive congress of 2008, the split that starred Àngel Colom and Pilar Rahola in founding the Partit per la Independència (PI) in 1996 is also noteworthy. It had been seven years since Esquerra had openly declared pro-independence, it was in the 1989 congress after the stage of Heribert Barrera and Joan Hortalà. After the split of the PI, Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira took over the reins of the formation alongside Joan Puigcercós, a tandem that would last until the 2008 congress.
