BarcelonaThe president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, made his first international trip this week, to Brussels. He landed in the Belgian capital with the aim of conveying to the community institutions that Catalonia wants to have a say in the European agenda and wants to push in favor of the use of Catalan in Europe. The choice of Brussels as the first destination, therefore, is not accidental. It responds to the desire of the Socialist Government to make a place for itself in the European Union, at the hand of the Spanish government, and to strengthen relations that cooled during the peak years of the Process. Illa has chosen Brussels to send this message, but where did the previous presidents make their debut?
What were the first international trips of the former presidents of the Generalitat?
The international agendas of his predecessors, Pere Aragonès and Quim Torra, were marked by exile. The former Republican president made his first trip to Waterloo to meet with former president and Junts leader Carles Puigdemont in June 2021, less than a month after being inaugurated. By then the Spanish government had already put pardons on the table. However, the two leaders made a common front to insist that this was not enough and that an amnesty had to be approved which, three years later, has not yet been effective for Puigdemont due to the refusal of the judiciary to apply it there. That summer, Aragonès also went to see Marta Rovira in Geneva. His first officially scheduled trip as president, however, was to Glasgow, to attend the COP26 climate summit and meet Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
The meeting of Torra and Puigdemont
Torra chose Berlin for his first official trips. He went there twice to see Puigdemont (the first time, the day after he was invested). The former president of the 1-O was residing in the German capital at the time, where he moved after passing through Neumünster prison, following the arrest warrant issued by judge Pablo Llarena for embezzlement and rebellion. Torra and Puigdemont showed complicity in a meeting that would be repeated a month later and in which they discussed the composition of the new Government. Outside of these meetings and those held with the councilors in exile in Brussels, Torra’s first international act was in the United States to participate in the Smithsonian folk festival (where castles and other displays of folk culture were made Catalan).
It was the awkwardness that made Puigdemont’s first trip end up being in Belgium. The president of Junts had to start his international agenda in Paris to attend an exhibition on Miquel Barceló at the National Library of France. However, he had to suspend it following the tragic traffic accident in Freginals in which 13 students died, and he did not debut the international agenda until April 2016, on a trip to Flanders and Brussels. In Ghent he met with the president of the region and defended Catalonia’s right to self-determination, and then traveled to Brussels, but without holding any meetings with EU officials. In fact, it was not until the term of Pere Aragonès that the Catalan executive resumed relations with the European Commission, frozen since 2015, with meetings of the president with the European commissioners of Justice and Internal Market.
Montilla and Mas also chose Brussels
Brussels was also the destination chosen by Artur Mas and José Montilla. The convergent former president opened with a first-level meeting with the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Durao Barroso. He also met with the leader of the European liberals and former Belgian minister, Guy Verhofstadt, and with who is now the Minister of Agriculture of the Spanish government, Luis Planas, then the Spanish ambassador to the EU. He was following in the footsteps of Montilla, who in his first stay abroad interviewed the commissioners of Competition, Joaquín Almunia, and the high representative of the EU, Javier Solana, both of the PSOE.
During this week’s trip, Salvador Illa did not meet with the future leader of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, or with any commissioner in office, but executive sources state that the idea is to be able to organize a meeting with her and the future members of the community executive when the Commission has already been elected.
Maragall and Pujol
Despite his pro-European commitment, the first international flight that Pasqual Maragall took as president was to go to Davos, coinciding with the World Economic Forum, to participate in talks on the 1992 Olympic truce and the relationship between regions and states The following month he went to Brussels, where he also met with the President of the Commission, Romano Prodi, and with two socialist leaders who held key positions in the Community framework: Solana and Pedro Solbes, Commissioner for the Economy. He had dinner with Michel Barnier, Commissioner for Regional Policy.
Pujol, on the other hand, opted to take the Catalan agenda first to Rome, where he met the Italian president and Pope John Paul II. In fact, the convergent ex-president gave the Pope the fifteen volumes of the Great Catalan Encyclopedia showing him on site which collects the history of the city of Cracow, Poland, where he was originally from. He also gave him a Catalan translation of his own poems – signed as Karol Wojtyla -, a missal of Santa Eulàlia from the 16th century and the Golden book of the rosary in Catalonia.
