The former leader of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) ranks on the Barcelona City Council, Ernest Maragall, has spoken out this Tuesday in response to the information asserting that members of ERC's own apparatus were behind the case of the defamatory posters which appeared during the 2023 mayoral election campaign, aimed at him and his brother and denigrating those who, like the former Barcelona mayor Pasqual Maragall, suffer from Alzheimer's. In a statement published on social media, Ernest Maragall admits that months after the case he became aware that the authorship corresponded to "people hired from some area of internal responsibility of ERC" and points directly, although without naming him, to the party's head of communication, Tolo Moya, as responsible: "It soon became clear that the then-communication director of the party was the person who had been responsible from an organic point of view". The party affirms that Moya is no longer ERC's communications director and that since last September has been an advisor to the Barcelona Provincial Council. However, sources close to Moya assert that no-one had notified him that he had stopped exercising this position and that he has continued to carry out the same tasks as when he was hired by the party.
Likewise, Maragall points out that once he became aware of these circumstances he had a "mixture of astonishment and deep discomfort, unable to understand what sense it could have, what objectives it was pursuing or who could have taken such an initiative". For this very reason, he points out that "taking into account that I had already abandoned the exercise of any institutional or organic responsibility" - in fact, Maragall left his seat in the Barcelona City Council in the December municipal meeting of last year - "I decided that it was best to ask for the proceedings to be archived".
A continuació trobareu la meva reflexió a partir de la publicació al @diariARA d'una àmplia crònica sobre uns fets lamentables i prou coneguts succeïts ja fa més d'un any: pic.twitter.com/3oJvG5LgkE
— Ernest Maragall i Mira (@ernestmaragall) July 2, 2024
It should be borne in mind that, according to the story published on Monday by the newspaper Ara, both the then-director of the strategy and communication office of president Aragonès, Sergi Sabrià, to whom Moya was responsible in the hierarchy, and the then deputy secretary of communication of ERC, Marc Colomer, would have been aware of the poster campaign, despite the fact that both deny having orchestrated the campaign against Maragall. In this regard, the former Barcelona ERC leader himself asserts that "an internal investigation has been opened to explain all that happened". "I want to show my conviction about the undoubted honesty of the Republican organization as a whole and of the immense majority of its leaders and managers", adds Maragall.
"I understand that all of the above does not diminish or excuse the political responsibility of Esquerra in the whole affair", continues the statement, in which Maragall affirms that he knows "the will of the current management not to close the issue falsely and take the appropriate measures to determine possible responsibilities". Likewise, Ernest Maragall expresses the "two feelings that kept alternating in my head all day yesterday", the first of which was "one of shame and horror for belonging, in some way, to a piece of society capable of carrying out actions as indecent as the one we have had to receive and combat", while the second was of "deep gratitude to so many people, from ERC and beyond, who yesterday told me of their own sense of shame and horror”. "It is these people who give me back my confidence in politics understood as a personal and collective commitment in the search for the best service to citizens", concludes Maragall.