The MEP and ‘ex-minister’ Clara Ponsatí returned to Barcelona this Tuesday with the awareness that she would be arrested to be brought before the judge. And also that after completing this procedure she would be released, since she is only accused of a crime of disobedience that does not carry a prison sentence. Seeing any elected representative of the citizens of Catalonia in a personally complicated procedural situation is unpleasant, and reminds us that there are still steps to be taken to normalize the democratic life of the country. But this gesture of “intelligent confrontation” applauded from Brussels by Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín has much less epic than what emerges from the protests of the MEPs at the doors of the Eurochamber and from the words of challenge that Ponsatí expressed in his round press after arriving in Catalonia.
The ‘former minister’ showed her credential from European Parliament before the Mossos agent who complied with the arrest warrant, to argue that enjoyed immunity and that therefore his arrest was illegal. The coverage given by her deputy act against the actions of the Spanish justice system is still the subject of debate. But what actually protected Ponsatí was the new procedural situation that stems from the penal modifications negotiated by the central government and Esquerradespite which she did not hide that her objective was “to denounce the passivity of the Catalan institutions.”
From his personal Twitter account, the images of the moment of the arrest were reproduced with the following message, addressed directly not to the judge but to the Catalan police: “The Mossos d’Esquadra em detenen il·legalment a Barcelona”. You can point in different directions when interpreting Who does Ponsatí seek to expose? with her decision to return to Barcelona not to face justice but to be brought before her by the police. Ponsatí , Puigdemont and Comín launched their darts simultaneously at the spanish justice together, to Republican Left and also to his former colleagues in the cause who have followed the same route before the judge who prosecuted them, but on their own feet. But with her messages, the ‘former minister’ also puts the Catalan police at the center of the controversy, exposing her to the reproaches of the Junts bases. Playing in a partisan way with the prestige and stability of a basic institution in the self-government of Catalonia such as the Mossos body, not because it is frequent and repeated, is no longer reprehensible.
In a pre-election contextthe decision of the ‘exconsellera’ to raise the temperature has another reading, in which those questioned and placed in an uncomfortable position are also the candidates of the party that Ponsatí represents in Strasbourg in the next municipal ones. the same day that Xavier Trias was on track with an agreement to get the former vice president of Unió on his boat Joanna Ortega and with it the PDECat, with the aim of presenting a candidacy that includes not only those who admit that the 1-O strategy failed but also those who had already warned before of the mistake that was going to be made, Ponsatí revived the path of “confrontation”. Junts can keep such contrasting speeches, rhetoric and gestures under its umbrella, but not indefinitely. An internal tension that, with the imminent sentence of the Laura Borràs trial, will be put to the test again.