President Artur Mas verbalized this Monday what was an open secret in Catalan politics: he's staying in the PDeCAT. And, as a result, he will not join Junts per Catalunya, the political group led by president in exile Carles Puigdemont and which was formally converted into a new party last July. With this decision, the wound of disunity in the so-called postconvergent* space is made deeper, after being aggravated first by one side and then by the other, while they await the next Catalan elections, at the start of next year, which will put everyone in their places. During his public appearance, Mas tried to be elegant with Puigdemont - with whom he maintains a formally impeccable and affectionate relationship that is reciprocal - and behaved like that person who feels hurt but whose last wish is to provoke a conflict even though he has a need to explain himself. In a nutshell, Mas neither agrees with nor understands what has happened, hence his harsh words: "I am sad, disappointed and angry."
Coincidentally, this is the second time that Artur Mas has "stepped to one side", as he puts it. The first time was in January 2016 when he resigned from the presidency of Catalonia as demanded by the CUP so that its deputies would accept a candidate from Junts pel Sí, the PDeCAT and ERC coalition which had won the 2015 election but lacked an absolute majority. From that resignation of Mas, for some generous and for others inexplicable, it is well known that the selection of Puigdemont arose by decision of the former president in order to continue along the path which would eventually lead to the referendum on 1st October 2017. He is now stepping aside for the second time: in view of the visible disunity, he is taking one further pace outwards in his progressive political distancing. And, thus, he has declared that the current situation has led him to give up any idea of participating in an electoral candidature in the next elections to the Catalan Parliament, to rule out holding any government responsibilities and also to close all options to any future office. He will focus on continuing to preach unity and on a more-institutional role as former president of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
People on both sides will have difficulty in explaining this outcome since Mas's political biography cannot be dismissed with a disdainful "I don't care!". In particular because his decisive role from 2012 - which caused him so many legal problems - also made hundreds of thousands of Catalans unequivocally align themselves in favour of the independence of Catalonia. It also helped them recognize the end of the "autonomous community" era, among other things, because Mas was the one who was in charge of the project and this was at that time a certain guarantee of order for the broader convergent community. By 2020 it is possible that some of these things that have been going on for almost a decade have been fully ingested as everything is moving very fast, especially all that is connected with leadership. There is no one left at the forefront out of all those who were in power in Madrid during those years, although the judicial, political and media persecution they initiated continues more alive than ever.
The fact that, after the newspaper El Mundo reported Spain's National Audience court as having brought a new action against Carles Puigdemont, the president of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, saw fit to refer the Catalan MEP's request for parliamentary protection against a breach of immunity to the Committee on Legal Affairs, is nothing more than a reflection of all this persecution. You can't just walk away from such blunders in Europe.
*Translator's note: The Catalan nationalist party Convergència Democràtica (CDC) dominated Catalan politics from the 1980s until the 2000s, mostly as part of the Convergència i Unió (CiU) alliance. Hence the adjectives convergent and - after the party was dissolved in 2016 - postconvergent.