Mas: ‘Without a president the process is at a standstill’

During a speech before the Catalan parliament, the acting president of the Catalan government, Artur Mas, sent a message to the CUP representatives who have announced they will not vote to elect him president: ‘Without an agreement on who will be sworn in as president there is no definitive government and consequently the process will be at a standstill’, Mas warned.

Although Together for Yes and CUP today jointly introduced and passed the declaration that has set in motion the independence process, the two separatist forces have not been able to reach an agreement on who will be named president. The anti-capitalist CUP continues to refuse to support Mas and has suggested other names from the Together for Yes list for the role of president, Neus Munté and Raul Romeva among them.

‘No one is superfluous to the process. I repeat: no one is superfluous’, noted Mas, in an allusion to the refusal of the CUP to support him for president. Mas later called on representatives to form a new government as soon as possible. ‘In order to do what we have to do we need a duly-formed government, not an interim government’, he said.

Mas made use of a seafaring metaphor when he said that ‘it depends solely on us that our sails are well oriented this week to catch the winds that arose from the polls on 27-S’. Mas began his speech with a reminder of the results of the election of 27 September, in which separatist parties won a majority of the vote. ‘We are no longer talking about a silent majority here. The polls have spoken’, he stated.

During his intervention, Mas also highlighted the Spanish government’s unwillingness to hold a dialogue on Catalonia’s demands for sovereignty. ‘The Spanish state continues to deny by all possible means the democratic will of a people’ Mas said. ‘In high-quality democracies’—he added—‘the government listens to the majority; pseudo-democracies put prosecutors, police, and the courts at the service of aborting reality’.

In a long speech that lasted over an hour and a half, Together for Yes’s candidate for president of the Catalan government voiced his regret that ‘Spain seems politically incapable of responding to the challenge posed by Catalan society’ and he rejected the ‘third-way’ option that has been floated for years.

Social-emergency plan

The governance plan presented by Mas focuses on social policies and is intended to ensure that, ‘with each passing day’, Catalonia ‘becomes less and less an autonomy and more and more a state’, Mas said, in reference to the political and administrative divisions currently in effect in Spain.

According to Mas, independence from Spain will bring about a context that will drastically reduce unemployment, generate more stable, higher-quality jobs, and allow pensions to be raised. ‘Catalonia would have been able to maintain the welfare state and public-sector salaries without instituting any cuts if it had had its own state’, he said.

The acting president has made it clear that if he wins the support he needs from MPs, the government will use ‘all available means, even if modest, to fight poverty and ensure equal opportunity’. He stressed the social emergency plan, which shares the limelight with the development of major state structures aimed at ensuring food security, housing, and energy coverage for the most vulnerable citizens.