Why is Carles Puigdemont not the head of the opposition?

BarcelonaFormer president Carles Puigdemont assured during the election campaign of May 12 that he would not act as head of the opposition of Salvador Illa. Now that the leader of the PSC has reached the presidency of the Generalitat and Junts is precisely who leads the opposition in Parliament, what will be the role of the ex-president in exile? It is taken for granted among Junts cadres that he will be the one who will take the reins of the party at the congress on the weekend of October 27. This same Sunday, in an interview with The Newspaperthe president of Parliament, Josep Rull, has said that Puigdemont’s “operational leadership” must have a “formal translation” within the party. Rull has defined him as an exceptional asset of the party that must be able to continue to be, operationally and formally: “I am convinced that we will be able to find the formula”.

But there are more doubts about his future in the chamber. According to party sources, it will be at the meetings that the parliamentary group has convened in Brussels on October 2 and 3 when he will reveal his role. A meeting that, among other things, will also serve to prepare the general policy debate. For now, Carles Puigdemont has not communicated any final decision on what he will do, according to the sources consulted, taking into account that he is waiting to see if the amnesty will be applied to him sooner or later.

In this context there are at least two scenarios. That he remains a deputy in Parliament, at least until his judicial future is clarified, but without exercising the position of head of the opposition and its associated prerogatives – if the exercise would change the script of what he had said -; or that he directly leaves the minutes to focus only on the match. If he opted for the first option, continuing his current situation, he would maintain a certain parliamentary immunity – despite the fact that the Parliament does not have the same protection as the Congress of Deputies and even less than the Eurochamber – and would allow Junts to denounce that the Supreme Court’s refusal to grant him amnesty prevents him from exercising his rights as a parliamentarian in person, as the party has done this week. At the same time, other consulted sources also believe that being head of the opposition would be interpreted as a lowering of the figure of the ex-president in exile.

For now, then, this position remains vacant. According to the rules of the chamber, it is the head of the opposition who “exercises the presidency of the parliamentary group of the opposition with the most seats in Parliament”. But it must be made official by the president of the chamber, Josep Rull, through a resolution that he has not yet issued. Sources from around the presidency clarify that there is no deadline or obligation to make this decision and that he will not do so if he is not given a name from the Junts parliamentary group. Thus, now the president of the group is Albert Batet, but he does not serve as head of the opposition.

The international commission

Be that as it may, what JxCat has done is distribute the deputies in the parliamentary committees and, in this case, has placed Puigdemont in that of the European Union and Foreign Action, because all members of the group must have a committee assigned to them . However, at the moment it is not expected that he will have a front-line role nor that he will intervene telematically through a screen as he did in the previous legislature Lluís Puig. In fact, this Friday, when the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jaume Duch, appeared, it was Francesc de Dalmases, Ennatu Domingo and Josep Rius who represented Junts.