The 131st Catalan president, Quim Torra, took to the rostrum of Parliament this Wednesday, two days after being disqualified from office and having previously been stripped of his status as an MP in January, to once again denounce the Spanish state's repression, calling on the parliamentary representatives to defend "tooth and nail" the sovereignty of the house.
The president ended his speech calling, as he also did in his speech on Monday at the Palau de la Generalitat, for the next Parliament to be "faithful to the mandate of the people: either Spanish monarchy or Catalan republic."
It was an unprecedented plenary session, as the opposition repeatedly complained while trying to prevent it from being held until the last moment. It was launched a few hours after the government approved a decree to substitute the president after confirming that the Spanish government was unwilling to publish the dismissal of the president in the official gazette as is normally done.
And this circumstance did not escape the attention of the house. Vice-president Pere Aragonès, who had to assume the functions of the president and spoke on behalf of the executive together with minister-spokeperson Meritxell Budó, used his speech to assure that "after the disqualification of president Torra, there is no president".
A brief speech
Torra, without a seat, had to enter the chamber going directly to the rostrum and left as soon as he had finished, while much of his government watched him from the space reserved for the public, since the pandemic means that most of the MPs' seats have to remain empty.
The former president made a brief speech in which he urged that the situation in which he finds himself should not be accepted or trivialized and denounced a "coup d'etat" against the institutions of Catalonia. “What they don’t win at the polls, they eliminate and re-make in the courtrooms,” he asserted.
"Defend until the final consequences"
This issue, said Torra, will arrive at the European courts. However, he added that there is also another "battle" being fought within the walls of the Catalan chamber. "There is a duty that must also be fulfilled by representatives of the people of Catalonia and it is a duty that is guided by national ideologies, parties and projects. It is the duty to defend - tooth and nail, and until the last consequences - democracy, the sovereignty of Catalans, which is represented and should be exercised in this Parliament ", he affirmed.
At the beginning of his speech, Torra noted that he had already warned against state repression in January when he tried to defend his seat following the Catalan High Court's sentence disqualifying him from office, and when the parliamentary Bureau, responding to this, withdrew his status as an MP. At the end he returned to the subject, to remind deputies that their seats do not belong to them, but are a direct designation made to them by the people, and that with his disqualification from office, the representation voted for by more than 4,300,000 citizens had been altered, which was a "scandal of colossal dimensions, to be added to a long list of irregularities."
He warned that this situation cannot be normalized, that all projects must be politically conceivable, that it is not acceptable to overthrow a government because of a banner, and that Spain must understand that "it cannot replace the popular will with the will of ensuring that the sacred unity of Spain always prevails, which is an outdated and imposed nineteenth-century idea".
Quim Torra during his speech in Parliament / Sergi Alcàzar
"Shame!"
The former president also had strong words for the opposition. "Shame on those who take the free expression of MPs to justice, shame," he said, addressing the head of the Ciudadanos group, Carlos Carrizosa. The Cs deputy replied shortly afterwards to Torra, with a strong criticism of the executive. Torra, however, was unable to follow this speech because he had already left.
He also made a sarcastic remark to Catalan Socialist secretary Miquel Iceta: "I have to apologize to Iceta, I said he had been in politics for 30 years. He has been in politics for 40 years." In this case, the Socialist leader was unable to hear the ousted president, because as the Socialists had announced in advance, they were not present in the session.
"I started my term as president without a government, and the legislature ends with a government without a president. It seems to me that it is a very clear picture of the completely extraordinary, absolutely surreal and kafkaesque situation we live in," he summed up.
JxCat deputies accompanied Torra to the doors of Parliament / Sergi Alcàzar
At the end, the president left the chamber and the speaker of Parliament adjourned the session for a few minutes, as usually occurs with special debate sessions, which gave the JxCat deputies the chance to accompany Torra, with applause, to Parliament's noble staircase and to the door.