The Together for Catalonia (Junts) politician Josep Rull, former Catalan government minister, and former political prisoner, imprisoned for sedition over the Catalan independence process before being pardoned, is the new speaker of the Parliament of Catalonia. Rull was elected on the second ballot thanks to the votes in favour of Junts, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and the Popular Unity Candidature (the CUP), with which he defeated the Catalan Socialist (PSC) candidate, Sílvia Paneque. ERC and the CUP, however, made clear their suspicions over lending their support to a Junts candidate for speaker and in the first round, Rull only received the vote of the 35 Junts deputies given that ERC and the CUP cast blank votes. The People's Party (PP), Vox and the Comuns voted for their own candidates while the far-right Catalan Alliance cast a null vote. The Bureau accepted the delegation of the votes of Carles Puigdemont and Lluís Puig, despite the ruling of the Constitutional Court that overturned Puig's remote vote under the last legislature.
VIDEO: Agustí Colomines's moment of hesitation before announcing the election of the new speaker
After a moment of confusion when the president of the Age Committee, Agustí Colomines, decided to continue with the voting, while forgetting to announce the name of the new speaker, the Junts deputies welcomed the election by getting to their feet, while the PSC and CUP members applauded without particular enthusiasm while seated. With this agreement between the pro-independence parties, the two deputy speaker positions went to Raquel Sans (ERC) and David Pérez (PSC), as first and second deputy speaker, respectively. The independentist majority in the seven-member Bureau was confirmed with the four remaining positions, the secretaries, posts which went to Glòria Freixa (Junts), Juli Fernàndez (ERC), Rosa Maria Ibarra (PSC) and Judit Alcalà (PSC). Junts gave votes to ERC, which also received votes of the CUP to obtain the second secretary position, and the Socialist group secured the third and fourth secretary roles by dividing its votes and thus leaving the PP out of the Bureau.
Former minister and political prisoner
Josep Rull, who became a member of the Catalan Parliament in 1997 and held a place on the Bureau, as third secretary, under the speakership of Núria de Gispert between 2010 and 2015, was Catalan minister for territory and sustainability in the government of Carles Puigdemont, from 2016. For his role in the 1st October referendum and independence process, he was sentenced to ten years and six months in prison, and a ban on holding public office, for sedition. He was partially pardoned by the government of Pedro Sánchez in 2021, along with the eight other imprisoned pro-independence leaders, and as his conviction did not have a misuse of funds component, he was able to run in the Catalan parliamentary elections on May 12th as the number three of the Junts candidacy.
Rull's candidacy for the speaker's position was not known until this Monday afternoon when, after the completion of talks with ERC and the CUP, Junts announced the proposal at the meeting of its parliamentary group. Faced with this agreement, the Comuns announced that they would vote for their own candidate in the first round, Susanna Segovia, and would abstain in the second round. In statements in the corridors of Parliament, Vox announced that they would not vote for the PSC candidate and the PP expressed itself similarly, attributing Rull's candidacy to a pact in which it suggested that the PSC had also taken part.
The Age Committee
This afternoon's parliamentary session, to constitute the officers of the new chamber, began with the provisional constitution of the Age Committee, with its three members selected automatically based on age, to conduct the rest of the day's business. The president of this committee, chosen because he was the oldest member of parliament, Agustí Colominas, opened the plenary with an "Elegy to Democracy". "We live in an era of violation of freedom all over the world", denounced the president of the committee to the assembled MPs, pointing out the expansion of totalitarianism in today's world and defending the right to self-determination of peoples.
The first to ask for the floor in the plenary held to begin legislature, over "a matter of order", was the PP deputy, Alejandro Rodríguez, who reproached Colominas for his speech and warned him that if he allowed the votes of Carles Puigdemont and Lluís Puig to be counted, his party would take the matter to the Constitutional Court, which last week "declared the nullity" of the mechanism used to allow Puig's remote voting in the last legislature. As well, Joan Garriga, of Vox, warned that Puig and Puigdemont do not meet the conditions required for vote delegation, and asked for a meeting of Parliament's board of party spokespeople, which, however, cannot meet because the party groups have not been constituted and nor have the spokespeople been appointed.