There will be no disobedience by Parliament, and the CUP deputy for Lleida, Pau Juvillà, remains in a legal limbo which, in practice, places him closer to being an ex-MP than an MP. With this decision, which is obviously political, the Catalan chamber deactivates any act of disobedience based on the pronouncement passed with urgency on Wednesday by the MPs Statute Committee with its new chairperson, the deputy and jurist Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, arguing that its action must be limited by the need to avoid affecting Parliament's civil servants. For very different reasons, the decision is not to the liking of either the pro-independence parties or the non-independence parties.
The speaker, Laura Borràs, finds she has lost a few garments in the wash, since she has not been able to take her commitment to maintain Juvillà's seat all the way, given that, after the decision of the Central Electoral Commission (JEC) which dispossessed him of it, there was no solid legal ground to stand on. Her party, Junts, has given him public support, but, nevertheless, different voices have expressed their unease about the situation if, in the end, it was not going to maintain a challenge to the JEC. The CUP has kept up the pressure along with Borràs over the party's deputy, since it wanted him to continue to be parliamentarian until the communication of the Supreme Court on his appeal, which should have been the court that ended up withdrawing the seat until the interference by the electoral board. ERC, for its part, watched from the sidelines: in the division among the pro-independence parties, it saw enough in the difficulties that Junts and its speaker got themselves into and over which they were unable to give a convincing explanation.
On the other side, the PSC, the Comuns, Vox, Ciudadanos and the PP have kept their satisfaction under control, seeing that there would be no act of disobedience, with different levels of political and legal intensity. The argument that on this journey more even steering would be sufficient sums up quite well the huge differences between the parties on some aspects, but also the unanimity against the pro-independence forces that was expressed whenever something related to the sovereignty of Catalonia was at stake. To throw it all thoroughly into chaos, the negotiations 600 kilometres away over the labour reform, which caused conflict between the Pedro Sánchez government and ERC, with the PSOE-Unidas Podemos executive having to make a deal with Ciudadanos, the PDeCAT and other centre-right parties, forgetting their allies on the left to move the change forward in the Congress of Deputies, left the Pere Aragonès government even more abandoned in the storm.
Just two examples: the CUP refused to attend the meeting that it had scheduled with the Catalan president to look for formulas for rebuilding pro-independence unity. In less than a week, both the CUP and the president of Aragòn, Socialist politician Javier Lambán, have stood Aragonès up. And the partner who helped the government pass its 2022 budget little more than a month ago, the Comuns led by Jéssica Albiach, threatened to withdraw its support in the Catalan chamber if ERC deputies did not cast their votes for the Spanish labour reform in Madrid, in a blatant act of arm-twisting to protect the Unidas Podemos minister, Yolanda Díaz, promoter and driving force of the new regulations.
To sum up and return to where we started: the suspension of the activity of the Catalan Parliament over the Juvillà case has turned into a dead end. Because, in politics, actions are valued for their result and I'm afraid that the objective sought here has not been achieved.