An ally of Puigdemont in a French department for the first time: Unitat Catalana breaks the barrier

BarcelonaOn March 20, Northern Catalonia entered the fray of Catalan politics with the controversy surrounding the delegate of Salvador Illa's government in the territory, Christopher Person, what's going on reject the name Catalunya del Nord. Beyond Junts, ERC and the CUP, there has been a northern Catalan party that has called for a dismissal that the executive has not done: Catalan Unity, a historic party created in 1986. A party that, in fact, has recently broken a historic barrier in Northern Catalonia. The Northern Catalan party has landed a representative on the departmental council of the Eastern Pyrenees, the equivalent of a provincial council that groups the Northern Catalan regions. With Jaume Pol, a Catalanist party has joined the institution for the first time, although there have been—and are—Catalanist representatives from French state parties, such as the Republican, Centrist, or Communist parties.

"It's very difficult to be elected, and it's interesting symbolically because it's a way of making a very clear Catalanist presence," Jaume Pol, who is co-president of the party and a member since almost its inception, assures ARA. "A priority task will be the consultation on the department's name change to incorporate Catalan identity," he adds, acknowledging that due to the French majority electoral system, had it not been for the alliance with other parties, he would not have been able to be elected alone with Unitat Catalana—a party that allied itself with Junts in 2021 as an autonomous voice. Already in his debut in mid-March at the plenary session of the departmental council, Pol asked the president of the institution, the socialist Hermeline Malherbe-Laurent, to speed up the consultation to change the name in the Pyrénées-Orientales, and admits that the discussion could be between País Català and Pirineus Catalans, which would also please him due to the presence of Catalan identity.

Obstacle Course

Catalan Unity ran in the 2021 regional elections in a coalition with an independent party and two center-right parties—the Centrists and the Union of Democrats and Independents—and won together with Vernet, a Perpignan neighborhood that is an electoral constituency. Jaume Pol replaced Benoît Castanedo, a member of the electoral committee, but not of Catalan Unity, who resigned following a case of domestic violence. Currently, the member of Catalan Unity is a provincial deputy for Vernet, along with centrist Annabelle Brunet, who has a Catalanist bent although she does not belong to a Catalan party, and who had been deputy mayor of Perpignan. Brunet was also "one of the most involved in Carles Puigdemont's event in Northern Catalonia" with the support of the Council of the Republic, according to Pol. The vice president of the department also is a notable Catalanist, Nicolas Garcia, the mayor of Elna, although he is not a member of any explicitly pro-Catalan party but rather of the Communist Party.

In Northern Catalonia, Jaume Pol has experienced a decline in the use of Catalan while the sense of Catalan identity has remained alive. "There has been a sharp drop in use because the people who spoke the language naturally through transmission have been disappearing, but thanks to Catalan schools, new generations have been able to rediscover the language." However, "the Catalan sentiment is shared; here it's normal to feel Catalan and French, without nationalist claims," he says. Even in France, they are called "Catalans," as on television, and this happens, for example, with rugby, both with the USAP and the Catalan Dragons.

The commitment to Catalan identity extends to both rugby clubs. In fact, the Catalan public address system and host at the Dragons stadium is the vice president of the Catalan Unit and delegate of the Northern Catalonia Language Platform, Enric Balaguer. He stated in this newspaper that he is working on implementing the platform on social media, although this has not yet been done. The USAP also signed a similar agreement and, in principle, is also planned to implement it.

The Catalan Unitat also serves as vice president of the mayor of Arles Baths and Palaldà, Maria Costa, who participated in the March 12 campaign with Puigdemont, and the deputy mayor of Argelès, Didier Lafont, along with other councilors such as Núria Iniesta, the mayor of Torre del Obispo. The Catalanist party from Northern Catalonia is also part of Regions and Peoples in Solidarity, an alliance of nationalist and regionalist parties in France, and also of the European Free Alliance, the European sovereigntist grouping of which ERC is a member. Catalan Unitat advocates self-government for Northern Catalonia with a territorial statute. For now, its first objective is the referendum to change the name of the department of the Eastern Pyrenees.