Origins: Esquerra, the catalyst of the Catalan republican movement

Esquerra Republicana is a progressive party which defends the independence of the Catalan nation and social justice. Founded in 1931, throughout its history of more than 80 years, Esquerra has experienced very different fortunes in parallel to the recent history of Catalonia and the whole of the Catalan-speaking countries (Catalonia, Northern Catalonia [in France], the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands and the Western Strip [in what is now the Aragon region]).

The origins of Esquerra Republicana lie in the republican and federal movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The way in which Catalan society transformed in the 19th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution led to the appearance of the first democratic and republican progressive and federalist social movements. At the same time, cultural and literary movement of the early 19th century known as the Renaixement (Renaissance) also led to the development of national awareness much alike that spurred by European Romanticism. Politically, the federal republican Congress in 1883 and the establishment of the Bases of Manresa [calling for devolution] in 1892 were the first two Catalan political movements with a clearly nationalist design.

In March 1931, at the end of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) appeared as a confluence of nationalist and left-wing sectors aiming to form a common front against a Spanish state that defended interests contrary to those of the Catalan lower classes which had been stymied in the past. The new party presided by Francesc Macià resulted from the union of Estat Català, the Partit Republicà Català and the L’Opinió group, and played a central role in the establishment of the Republic in Catalonia and Spain.

The most important elements of the ideas behind the new party were the recognition of Catalonia as a nation, the defence of people’s individual rights and the redistribution of wealth, whereas the social programme defended full trade union freedom, the right to strike, the defence of minimum wages, the eight-hour working day, compulsory holidays, insurance and retirement as well as vocational training centres.

In the municipal elections of April 1931, ERC was victorious in Catalonia and Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic. The republican forces won throughout Spain, and Macià negotiated home rule for Catalonia. Macià agreed to restore the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Catalan government institution suppressed in 1714, and the Catalan Statute of Autonomy was approved, which included some of the institutions of self-government lost by Catalonia in the War of Succession (1705-1714).

During the Republic, from 1931 to 1939, ERC was the overwhelming majority party in Catalonia, winning all the elections. Francesc Macià died in 1933 and was succeeded by Lluís Companys as the President of the Generalitat Government of Catalonia. Companys proclaimed the Catalan State in 1934 in a context of involution by the Spanish right and the threat of a military coup. As a result, Companys was imprisoned and the Generalitat was abolished, until the victory of the Front d’Esquerres [left-wing party coalition] in 1936, when he was released from prison.

Resisting through the darkest times: The Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship

Though failing in Catalonia, the uprising by the Spanish military against the democratic order of the Second Republic triggered the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During the war years, Lluís Companys remained the President of the Generalitat and ERC played a key role in government, along with other political and social forces.

The victory of General Franco’s troops brought the war to an end and started a bloody fascist-inspired dictatorship. President Lluís Companys was arrested by the german military police in France and handed over to the Spanish government, which had him executed by a firing squad at Montjuïc Castle above Barcelona in October 1940, an unprecedented act: He is the only president of a democratically elected government ever to be executed.

Esquerra Republicana suffered the repression of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) like Catalan society in general. Half of ERC’s 70,000 members sought exile and a quarter were imprisoned, executed or killed in the war. ERC established a government in exile and maintained very minor clandestine activity in Catalonia, consisting of participating in all joint initiatives by the opposition to the dictatorship.

On another note, in the seventies the first formulae of a modern Marxist independence movement appeared, inspired by the national freedom movements of former colonies. This came to shape numerous pro-independence and left-wing organisations of different political shades, which came together to form the Esquerra Republicana of the nineties.

Struggling in democracy: rising from its ashes

The severity of the political and social repression and the demographic, social and economic changes experienced by Catalan society led to the virtual disappearance of the party. In 1977, in the first elections after the dictatorship, ERC was not able to take part directly as it had not been legalised.

In Catalonia and throughout the Spanish state, a new system of parties appeared and ERC played a very small role in comparison with the hegemony of the 1930s. The new political forces drew up and defended a Spanish constitution which ERC voted against because it failed to accept the republican principles or the people’s right to self-determination.

The so-called Spanish democratic transition consisted of an agreement between the remaining Francoists and the democratic opposition. The Francoist regime was not officially condemned, even though it had risen up against the democratic regime of the Second Republic. There was no recognition of the victims of the dictatorial repression and nobody has yet been tried for the crimes committed by Francoism or for its breach of individual and collective human rights.

The most flagrant example is the trial of President Companys by a kangaroo court, which the Spanish State has repeatedly refused to annul. In addition to a total lack of procedural guarantees, the very brief court-martial which condemned him to the firing squad was a condemnation of democracy and the whole of the Catalan people. At the end of 2013, ERC brought a suit before the Argentine justice against the Spanish State accusing it of crimes against humanity for the assassination of the president of the Republican Generalitat government. The lawsuit was admitted and a further 200 suits were added for those murdered by the Francoist regime. The disregard for historical memory was one of the basic features of the agreement on transition to democracy in Spain, unlike the processes of historical review conducted in Germany, Italy and South Africa.

With President Tarradellas’ return from exile, Catalonia’s Generalitat government was restored and a new statute of autonomy was drawn up for Catalonia. ERC opposed the text as it provided little support for autonomy, but ended up defending the yes vote in the referendum. In the first elections to the Catalan Parliament after the dictatorship, ERC won 14 of the 135 members, although in successive elections it was routed and lost its representation in the Madrid Parliament. The centre-right wing Convergència i Unió, which has to date won all of the Catalan elections, led the creation and consolidation of the autonomic institutions through agreements with the different governments of Madrid.

In the 1990s, ERC strengthened its position as an independentist party by proposing the creation of an independent state, a member of the European Union. Gathering together the different political factions of the independentist movement, it progressively increased its electoral weight and was consolidated as the third political force behind the centre-right wing Convergència i Unió (CiU) and the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC–PSOE) Socialist party. On the municipal level, it also achieved a broad representation of councillors and mayors throughout Catalonia.

In the late 1990s, the independentist discourse took on a greater social slant, engaging new social groups, which had until then been distanced from the party. This brought ERC up to 545,000 votes and 23 members in the Catalan parliament. At the same time, the party’s decisive position enabled the creation of the first Catalanist left-wing government since the Republic along with the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC-PSOE) and Iniciativa per Catalunya-Verds (ICV) parties. In 2003, Esquerra Republicana del País Valencià (ERPV), the Valencian Country party branch, won its first councillors in Sueca, Xixona and Barxeta.

In Catalonia, this so-called tripartite (three-party) government put forward a broad social programme whose main goal was the reformation of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy and the financing system of the Generalitat government. ERC played a decisive role in this government and held several ministries, including Education, Welfare and Family, Trade, Governance, and Universities.

When the Catalan parliament approved the Statute with a broad consensus, the agreement between CiU and the PSOE in Madrid had it considerably curtailed on its way through the Spanish parliamentary process. In the referendum for its approval, ERC called for a vote against it, taking the party out of government, which provoked early elections.

Though losing votes, Esquerra Republicana achieved an important result in those elections (416,000 votes and 21 seats) and the “progress pact” was repeated with PSC-PSOE and ICV-EUiA. In the following elections in 2010, the electorate punished ERC, with the party losing almost half of its votes and eleven seats, compared with 2006, and these poor results were repeated in the subsequent elections. CiU returned to the Generalitat government after 7 years in opposition.

At the same time, Esquerra Republicana took part in the 2007 autonomic elections in the Balearic Islands, in association with Partit Socialista de Mallorca–PSM, Izquierda Unida–IU, and Els Verds in Majorca, and with PSOE, IU and Entesa Nacionalista i Ecologista–ENE in Ibiza. In addition to several municipal representatives, these elections gave Esquerra Republicana a representative in the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, and a Councillor on the Council of Majorca (Consell de Mallorca). The progessive parties achieved a majority that enabled several Esquerra Republicana representatives to join the autonomic government, the government of the Consell de Mallorca and the government of Palma.

Esquerra, pushing tirelessly the Catalan process towards independence

With the arrival of Oriol Junqueras as the President of Esquerra Republicana in 2011, a new stage of unity was started in which Esquerra Republicana works with civil society to achieve the objective of Catalan inde­pendence. The enormous demonstration on 11 Sep­tember 2012 in Barcelona, organised by the Catalan National Assembly, triggered the calling of elections on 25 November and started a new stage marked by the right to decide on the political agenda.

Esquerra Republicana obtained 496,000 votes in those elections and became the second block in the Parliament with 21 seats. These results made Oriol Junqueras the leader of the opposition and led to an agreement signed with CiU providing parliamentary support for the government of Artur Mas. The main aim of this agreement was to call a peoples’ vote on self-determination in 2014 and to bring about social change to the policy of economic austerity of the Generalitat government.

Esquerra Republicana ran in the Junts pel Sí coalition in the following elections for the Catalan Parliament, held on 27 September 2015 explicitly exceptional and declared a plebiscite. This unique coalition that united diverse political forces and had the support of the main civic pro-independence entities, triumphed with a total of 62 members of parliament and more than 1,628,000 votes, 39.59 percent of the total.

The formation of the Government stemming from those elections, presided by Carles Puigdemont, was made possible by the agreement between Junts pel Sí and 10 other members of parliament from a left-wing pro-independence ticket. Oriol Junqueras was appointed Vice President of the Government and Minister of Economy. By the end of 2016, the Catalan Government announced its intention of holding a binding referendum in October 2017 With Oriol Junqueras being elected the President of Esquerra Republicana in 2011, a new phase of rapprochement began, by which Esquerra Republicana has been working with civil society to achieve the objective of Catalan independence. The enormous demonstration on 11 September 2012 in Barcelona, organised by the Catalan National Assembly, triggered the calling of elections on 25 November and started a new stage marked by the right to decide on the political agenda.

Esquerra Republicana obtained 496,000 votes in those elections and became the second block in the Parliament with 21 seats. These results made Oriol Junqueras the leader of the opposition and led to an agreement signed with CiU providing parliamentary support for the government of Artur Mas. The main aim of this agreement was to call a peoples’ vote on self-determination in 2014 and to bring about social change to the policy of economic austerity of the Generalitat government.

Esquerra Republicana ran in the Junts pel Sí coalition in the following elections for the Catalan Parliament, held on 27 September 2015 explicitly exceptional and declared a plebiscite. This unique coalition that united diverse political forces and had the support of the main civic pro-independence entities, triumphed with a total of 62 members of parliament and more than 1,628,000 votes, 39.59 percent of the total.

The formation of the Government stemming from those elections, presided by Carles Puigdemont, was made possible by the agreement between Junts pel Sí and 10 other members of parliament from a left-wing pro-independence ticket. Oriol Junqueras was appointed Vice President of the Government and Minister of Economy. By the end of 2016, the Catalan Government announced its intention of holding a binding referendum in October 2017; the Catalan institutions petitioned the state up to 18 times, all unsuccessfully, for the powers to hold one. In addition to that, the suspension of Catalan laws by the Constitutional Court was constant, with a total of 46 laws stayed.

Before October 2017, the Spanish police unsuccessfully searched for the ballot boxes to be used for the referendum, closed printing presses and censored media. In addition, more than 700 mayors were summoned before the courts, and on September 20 several government officials were arrested, accused of participating in the organization of the referendum. On October 1, 2017, despite all the threats and pressure from the state, thousands of citizens made possible the distribution of ballot boxes and papers, and the opening of polling stations. In response to that, thousands of police officers relocated from the rest of Spain began violent charges against voters, injuring up to 900 citizens. It was the first time in Europe that the police attacked citizens for wanting to vote.

That referendum had a turnout of almost 2,300,000 people, and the yes to independence was supported by 90.18 percent of the voters.

On October 27, the same day Parliament declared independence, the Spanish government imposed direct-rule in Catalonia through application of article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, of very doubtful legality, with the Catalan institutions taken under the direct command of the Spanish Government; in the hands of high-ranking State civil servants with no knowledge of the country or any sensitivity for the needs of the people. Moreover, half of the Catalan government was forced into exile and the other half were taken into pretrial detention. The two main leaders of pro-independence civil society, Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart, had already been imprisoned two weeks earlier. Shortly after, Carme Forcadell, the Speaker of the Parliament of Catalonia, was also imprisoned. In addition to all this, there has been a return to old forms of far-right vigilante violence against supporters of Catalan independence.

Despite all this, the elections held in Catalonia by the Spanish Government on 21 December 2017, with the main leaders of the Catalan Government in prison or in exile and the pro-independence parties in a state of shock from the repression suffered, those supporting the Catalan Republic again saw an unquestionable triumph that, with the members of Parliament of the three pro-independence groups that ran maintaining the parliamentary majority prior the application of article 155 of the Constitution, by which the Spanish government had suspended home rule. ERC won a total of 32 seats in the Parliament of Catalonia.

From February to June 2019, the trial of the independence leaders was held in the Spanish Supreme Court. The trial was plagued by inconsistent statements by Spanish security forces and political off icials in order to create a nonexistent account of violence. Several international NGOs specialized in human rights denounced procedural irregularities. On October 10, 2019, after almost two years in pretrial detention, sentence was passed condemning the Catalan leaders to between 9 and 13 years in prison for sedition and/or embezzlement. Altogether, almost a century of jail as punishment for implementing a democratic mandate.

Esquerra Republicana currently is seeking a resolution to the conflict that would lead to convening a mutually agreed referendum. The party has therefore agreed with the new Spanish government (a coalition between the Socialist party [PSOE] and the leftist Unidas Podemos), to establish a negotiating table with a mandate to find a political way out of the conflict.