12.02.2015 - 18:44
A conflict has broken out between Convergència (CDC) and Unió (UDC), the two parties forming the federation currently forming the Government of Catalonia. Tensions have grown between the two groups in recent years alongside the movements in the process to independence. President Mas’s party (CDC) has moved along the road towards independentism, whereas Duran, the leader of UDC, continues to favour the hinge role with Madrid and prevents his party from deciding on independence.
The crisis is now more intense than ever after yesterday, when the CDC members abstained in the voting in the Spanish parliament on the agreement between the PP and the PSOE over the Jihadist movement, which favours life imprisonment, whereas the members of Unió voted in favour. The members of Unió in the Spanish parliament are now considering holding no further group meetings with Convergència, as Josep Sánchez-Llibre, Duran i Lleida’s right hand man, explained yesterday.
Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida said yesterday morning that he felt undermined by the CDC members who, according to him, had gone ‘against what was decided’. Duran sees this as something serious that had never happened before. ‘It is the first time a spokesperson has been undermined.’ And he continued, ‘There was no need, reason or excuse to legitimate them for what they did.’
CDC denies having undermined Duran
By contrast, the leaders of CDC deny that there was any agreement in the federation and say that the abstention was the most coherent vote. They do not see there has been any undermining of Duran i Lleida. They explain that in the meeting of the national executive committee of the federation the sense of the vote was not explicitly set. It was shown that UDC and the group’s spokesperson, Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida, were in favour of a yes vote, a position that the representatives of CDC attribute to a personal commitment on the part of Duran. The differences were already clear in that meeting.
According to the same sources, the origin of the discrepancy is that there are ‘different readings’ of the situation and the political context and strategy to be followed in Madrid, and they recall that at a time when the President of the Government of Catalonia and two ministers have been summonsed in the plaint for the 9-N vote, no affirmative vote to an initiative on the part of Rajoy’s government is justified.
