So much talk of former Catalan president Jordi Pujol, so much talk of how history will end up judging him that it's been forgotten that history is stricter and more bothersome than a tax inspector with curiosity and time to kill. You've forgotten to recognise that Artur Mas will end up as the great historic president and the other as the great villain, simply because one acted as a king and the other as a viceroy, one as a sovereign and the other as a regional and regionalist governor. History only likes the winners. Jordi Pujol mocked Artur Mas and called him Andreu Mas, looking to strip him of his dignity and monarchy with the name change, taking revenge on the handsome man, which is what all ugly men who envy the looks they get from women do, trying to humiliate him because, it goes without saying he would. And he, Pujol, and Duran i Lleida, the two great genii, thought that they knew how the world really worked and that the other, Mas, who was a nobody who knew nothing, surprisingly is the one who managed to understand something about politics and, what is more important, managed to understand something about what Catalonia is and what it wants. Meanwhile, Jordi Pujol, the perfect conservative, the perfect egoist, stained his brilliant biography making a little nest egg for himself, for his children, for his wife, for whoever you want (the cemeteries are full of good intentions). And the other, the second fiddle, the nobody, precisely because he was nobody and wasn't about being a martyr, has ended up ruined by diabolic politics. Precisely because Artur Mas wasn't originally even a Catalan nationalist, he's ended up becoming an independence supporter later on, he's ended up becoming the politician who manages to amend and improve the controversial inheritance of Francesc Cambó and the one who definitively brings the centre-right Catalan nationalism to the great family of sovereignty. Against all predictions.
Naturally, not everything in Artur Mas's political biography is admirable, but we can say that he's been the most hated Catalan since Lluís Companys. Just for that we should wonder why and see that among the supporters of liberty and of disagreement, among the dissenting voices, is where he inspired the most fervent affection. On the one hand, all the pro-Spain political parties, without exception, have attacked him because he dared to reject the Pujol model of autonomy which was okay for them. On the other hand, from the great Catalan bourgeoisie to the CUP, going through all those who benefit from political stagnation, absolutely everyone has ridiculed him, has fought him viciously. If at least he had been a conventional revolutionary, a Marxist, a subcomandante Marcos, a badly-shaved man fond of going to the Parliament by bike, a new man foreseen in the dogmatic manuals of historical materialism, at least then it would have been different. But no, the future is never written and no prophetic book can assure you who the men who will open a new period are, not even the Old Testament. The new period, the new life, appears where you least expect it; that perhaps is the fun of living and trying to understand what you're living through.
Artur Mas has not just ruined himself for his country. He's also destroyed his party. He knew perfectly well that leading Convergència to the independence movement, challenging the Spanish state and organising the 2014 "consultation" and the 2017 referendum would have the gravest consequences. Mas understood, at some point, that the main parties of the autonomist regime, CiU (his Convergència and allies Unió) and the PSC would be wiped from the map with the sovereignty movement and, unlike the second, he sensibly believed that it was better to go for a controlled demolition of his party than to leave everything to chance. The day he decided to leave (provisionally) the presidency of Catalonia he didn't choose a substitute from his party's apparatus. He didn't pick out Rull or Turull. He choose precisely the least CiU member of CiU, a man who had no sympathy for the political inheritance of Jordi Pujol either, a daring independence supporter who could lead the desire for freedom of the Catalan nation. And yes, okay, one day he came to the Parliament by helicopter, but don't you find that right for a country as fun as ours?