The reappearance of Elsa Artadi former minister for the presidency under Quim Torra's mandate as head of the Catalan government and who suddenly abandoned the Together for Catalonia (Junts) candidacy for the Barcelona city council last May, after a voluntary isolation of several months, as a new adviser to the president of the major Catalan employers' association Foment del Treball, Josep Sánchez Llibre, is one of those news stories that you have to read twice. Artadi joins Sánchez Llibre's think-tank in an unequivocal gesture that, as she has said, orients her professional future towards the private sector after her front-line political experience between the end of 2017 and her resignation in May. Fifty-six months in which she could even have been president of the Generalitat, in that designation when Torra ended up being the chosen one, later vice-president of the Pere Aragonès government and a period in which Artadi undoubtedly occupied one of the most trusted, if not the most trusted of the figures close to president Carles Puigdemont. From which it was understood that she was at the core of the president in exile's day-to-day.
Artadi will share a work table with the former Spanish Socialist minister Valeriano Gómez and the ex-Catalan Socialist deputy Álex Sáez Cubero, the PP's Enrique Lacalle and Vicente Martínez Pujalte and the Christian democrat Manuel José Silva in the small club of presidential advisers, whose function to "advise and make specific proposals for Foment actions". In this round, Artadi is joined by the former Catalan justice minister of the Unió party, Toni Isaac; fellow Christian democrat, ex-Spanish MP and ex-adviser to Spain's National Market and Competition Commission, Josep Maria Guinart; and the doctor and associate researcher of the CRES, Laura Pellisé. In total, nine advisers and a new arrival who is, to say the least, attention-grabbing.
Foment's Spanish unionist and conservative base is broadening, an expression that is undoubtedly very fashionable lately and more typical of political than business circles. Nowadays, everyone wants to broaden their base, although I'm not entirely sure that Sánchez Llibre and the employer are giving a nod to independence, from which, as an employer, they remain very distant for obvious reasons. What is true is that, last February, president Carles Puigdemont and Sánchez Llibre met for the first time since the former went into exile in 2017, much to the displeasure of the CEOE, who did not avoid condemning the meeting they had held at the European Parliament in Brussels.
Coincidentally, this news has reached public attention on the day when the parliamentarians of Together for Catalonia in the Congress, the Senate and the European Parliament were meeting in the EU capital with Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Lluís Puig, sowing some logical confusion among the ranks of Junts, which had placed her internally closer to the positions of Laura Borràs than Jordi Turull. Or in other words, further away from the sector considered pragmatic than from the one that has opted to leave the Government. But well, Junts is so difficult to interpret that, a month after they left the Catalan government to mark their own political profile, there are still those who are surprised that in these four weeks they have only been in the eye of the hurricane for negative news. If they were not often unable to send positive messages when they governed, why should they be able to in the opposition, where everything is much more difficult?