The ANC is on the verge of opening up as a channel. The risk of schism that EL PERIÓDICO advanced on January 31st due to the decision to present an electoral candidacy outside the pro-independence parties has reached such a point that members of the secretariat – the body that governs the independence entity, made up of some seventy people – finalize their resignation en bloc in plenary session this Saturday. Of the twenty or so critical secretaries, it will be necessary to see how many finally leave office, but among those who are thinking about it is the vice president of the Assembly, Jordi Pesarrodonaaligned with those who point out the lack of debate and the non-compliance with the agreed resolutions by the leadership presided over by Dolors Feliu.
“Some of us have already decided and others are considering whether it is more useful to stay inside or outside the secretariat,” explains one of the voices that has raised the pulse in the direction. The objective of the critics is not to leave the entity, but to leave the secretariat and, from the base of the ANC, where they claim to have significant support, collect signatures to achieve the dismissal of the current leadership and force elections in the entity.
The degree of internal tension skyrocketed at the meeting on January 28, when lay down -by 29 votes against 28- the working group that was intended to be approved to start drawing up the so-called ‘civic list’. Two thirds of favorable votes were needed in the plenary, which was held electronically, and Feliu’s proposal did not arrive nor to the simple majority.
Deficiencies in the internal debate
The internal schism has to do not so much with the idea of presenting a civic list, but in how it has defended itself from inside and outside doors. Critics accuse Feliu of wanting impose a plan without sufficient debate and participation of all the members who run the entity. The president has been the most belligerent voice of the ANC when it comes to publicly defending a candidacy outside the parties, but her detractors regret that she does so without taking into account that this, in any case, has to be debated in the frame of the general strategy that the entity should detail in the conference scheduled for the month of March.
One of those critical members of the secretariat assured in a ‘Vilaweb’ blog that the commitment to the civic list is being made from a “narrow” vision rather “broad” because other entities have not been made part of this roadmap and because the civic list has ended up being “reduced” to the creation of a “hypothetical fourth electoral space” instead of being a stimulus to “galvanize” the independence. In addition, she regretted that the debate was restricted during the plenary session on the 28th, where Feliu herself assumed the presidency.
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Before seeing resignation as the only way out, the critics organized themselves into an internal current, the Col lectiu Indesinenter, which last week issued a statement that amounted to a kind of ultimatum for the permanent committee – the hard core of the dozen members who command the ANC – to agree to remodel itself after months of acting with “centralism and abuse of power” and with “bad practices and irregularities”. Feliu is part of this permanent committee as president and other members faithful to her direction, such as Uriel Bertranbut also Pesarrodona, who disagrees with them.
After this order, part of the critics come to the conclusion that it is not possible to redirect the internal crisis and that the only way out is his resignation from the secretariat. On February 2, a secretary already resigned, Monica Batalla, although he did so individually, while the resignations on Saturday are being worked on collectively. The plenary session, which will start at nine in the morning at the Center Moral i Cultural del Poblenou and has six in the afternoon as the set time to end, is expected to be long, as well as tense, and could mark a turning point in the mandate from Feliu.