Carles Puigdemont's star signing leaves Parliament

BarcelonaBusinesswoman Anna Navarro, who was Carles Puigdemont's great bet in the 2024 elections, is leaving Parliament. In a statement, Junts has announced that the party's number two candidate has resigned her seat, taking advantage of the end of the current session. She did so during a meeting of the parliamentary group, citing "personal and professional" reasons, according to the text released by the party. Navarro, however, will remain linked to the organization: she will continue to be part of Junts' permanent leadership and executive committee. Before making it public, she had communicated her decision to the party leader, Secretary General Jordi Turull, and the parliamentary group leader, Mònica Sales. During this legislature, Navarro had not played a prominent role in Parliament or in the party's major day-to-day decisions, despite being presented at the time as the Junts' great signing.  

The woman from Olot, professionally known as Anna Navarro Schlegel, entered politics after more than three decades of career in Silicon Valley, where she has led product strategy and engineering teams at companies such as Cisco Systems, Xerox, or Procore Technologies, of which she is vice president. With a degree in Anglo-Germanic Philology and Telecommunications, she founded her own company in San Francisco in 1992. In fact, before making the leap into politics, she already enjoyed wide recognition: in 2021 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi for her work in globalization strategies for technology companies, and in 2018 she was included among the 100 most influential women in the sector by a specialized American media outlet.

Her signing as Puigdemont's number two, in April 2024, was then seen as an attempt by Junts to strengthen the candidacy's economic profile and as a possible step towards a government position if the party reached the Generalitat. This option closed with Salvador Illa's investiture, and her role as a deputy has ended up being less relevant than expected two years ago. Without executive responsibilities, Navarro's role as a deputy has ended up being, in practice, almost testimonial. Nevertheless, Navarro has valued this stage "very positively," marked, as she said, by "intensity, demand, and learning," and has appreciated the shared journey with her group colleagues.

Navarro leaves the Catalan chamber with some controversies behind her. In a session of the Committee on European Union and Foreign Action in April 2025, the now former deputy denounced having had more difficulty being attended to in a primary care center (CAP) than an immigrant. Navarro recounted that the odyssey she had suffered to regularize her situation in Catalonia after living thirty years in the United States had been "horrible". "Arriving and not even being able to have the right to go to the CAP because I didn't have a payslip yet, when other people enter this country and can go", she said. "If you were an immigrant, we would give it to you today", she assured that a nurse told her. Statements that caused a great stir with reproaches from different parliamentary groups, who labeled them as xenophobic.