Republican Left of Catalonia
The Republican Left of Catalonia is a pro-Catalan independence, social democratic political party in the Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia, with a presence also in Valencia, the Balearic Islands and the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales. It is also the main sponsor of the movement for independence from France and Spain in the territories known as Catalan Countries, focusing in recent years on the creation of a Catalan Republic in Catalonia-proper.
ERC members sit in the unicameral Catalan Parliament, which exercises devolved powers within Spain. The party also contests and wins elections for seats in both houses of the Spanish Cortes Generales, as well as the European Parliament, where it sits as a member of the European Free Alliance. In 2022, ERC had 9,047 members. It is headquartered in Barcelona. Currently, its president is Oriol Junqueras and its secretary-general is Elisenda Alamany.
ERC was founded almost 100 years ago, and has counted amongst its leaders Francesc Macià, Lluís Companys and Josep Tarradellas. ERC played an important role in Catalan and Spanish politics during the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War, as part of the anti-Francoist resistance, and in Spain's transition to democracy. After a difficult period in the 1980s, it recovered a key electoral position during the 2000s, becoming a coalition partner in various Catalan governments. In 2021, an ERC member won the presidency of Catalonia for the first time since 1980, with the appointment of lawyer Pere Aragonès as President of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
History
Republic and first Catalan self-government (1931–1936)
After the fall of Primo de Rivera, the Catalan left made great efforts to create a united front under the leadership of left-wing independentist leader Francesc Macià. The Republican Left of Catalonia was founded at the Conference of the Catalan Left as the union of the independentist Estat Català, led by Francesc Macià, the Catalan Republican Party, led by Lluís Companys, and the L'Opinió Group of Joan Lluhí i Vallescà.The party did extremely well in the municipal elections of 12 April 1931. Two days later, on 14 April, few hours before the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in Madrid, Macià proclaimed in Barcelona the Catalan Republic within the Iberian Federation. This was not exactly what had been agreed in the Pact of San Sebastián, so three days later they negotiated with the Madrid government that Macià would become President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, an autonomous Catalan government within the recently founded Spanish Republic.
In September 1932, the Spanish Republican Cortes approved the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia which, among other provisions, granted a Catalan Parliament with broad legislative powers, and it was elected on 20 November 1932. The Republican Left of Catalonia, in coalition with the Socialist Union of Catalonia and other minor left-wing parties, won a large majority of seats, while the previously hegemonic Regionalist League, representing a more conservative view of Catalan nationalism, came in second place but far behind ERC. From this strong position, the ERC through the Catalan Government sought to improve living conditions of the popular classes and the petite bourgeoisie, approving laws in areas such as in culture, health, education and civil law. The Catalan Government also progressed the Crop Contracts Law, which sought to protect tenant farmers and grant them access to the land they were cultivating; it was contested by the Regionalist League and provoked a legal dispute with the Spanish government. In October 1933, Joan Lluhí and other members of the l'Opinió Group, as well Josep Tarradellas, withdrew from the ERC due to disagreement with Macià over the distribution of powers between the Executive Council of Catalonia and the President of the Generalitat; they founded the Nationalist Republican Left Party.
Francesc Macià died in office in December 1933 and Lluís Companys was elected by the Parliament of Catalonia as the new President of the Generalitat. On 6 October 1934, following the appointment of right-wing members of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right as ministers in the Government of the Spanish Republic, Companys unlawfully declared a Catalan State "within a Spanish Federal Republic". CEDA was considered close to fascism and, therefore, it was feared that the ministers' appointment was a first step toward suppressing the autonomy of Catalonia and taking complete power nationally. The nascent Catalan 'state' was quickly suppressed by the Spanish Army, and members of the Catalan government were arrested. Party leaders and Catalan officials were tried by the Supreme Court of the Republic, receiving jail sentences, while the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia was suspended.
In 1936, at the dawn of the Spanish Civil War, ERC became part of the Popular Front to contest that year's election. Esquerra became the leading force of the Popular Front, in Catalonia, which it won 41 from 54 Catalan seats, 21 of them belonging to ERC. The new left-wing Spanish government pardoned Companys and the members of the Catalan government, restoring the self-government. In June 1936, Estat Català split from ERC, while the PNRE rejoined it.
Civil War, Francoism and clandestinity (1936–1976)
During the Spanish Civil War, ERC, as the leading force of the Generalitat, tried to maintain the unity of the Front in the face of growing tensions between the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification and the pro-Soviet Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, while struggled to recover the control of the situation, de facto controlled by the anarchist trade union CNT and their militias, and attempted to organize the war efforts in Catalonia. President Companys appointed Josep Tarradellas Conseller Primer in order to form a coalition government with the other Republican forces, including anarchists and communists. However, the party unsuccessfully tried to avoid the full control of Catalonia by the Republican government, enacted after the May Days event.The party was declared illegal by Francisco Franco after he came to power in 1939. The former president of the Catalan Generalitat, Lluís Companys, was arrested by Nazi German agents in collaboration with Vichy France, returned to Spain and executed on 15 October 1940 in Montjuïc Castle, Barcelona.
Since 1939, despite the weak situation of the party, almost disbanded after the Francoist occupation of Catalonia, ERC went underground and tried to organize anti-fascist resistance around Manuel Juliachs and Jaume Serra. In 1945, the ERC Congress, held in Toulouse since many ERC members lived in exile in France, appointed former Minister Josep Tarradellas as Secretary General, a position he left in 1954 when he was elected President of the Generalitat of Catalonia in exile, replacing Josep Irla. The office of General Secretary of ERC then passed to Joan Sauret. At the end of World War II, in view of a possible overthrow of Francoist Dictatorship with the intervention of the Allied forces, the direction of ERC in exile sent to Catalonia Pere Puig and Joan Rodríguez-Papasseit. During those years ERC was present at the Council of Catalan Democracy and the Council of Democratic Forces. In 1952, Heribert Barrera returned to the interior and assumes the direction of the party de facto. On 11 September 1964, the National Day of Catalonia, ERC and other groups organized the first anti-Franco demonstration since the end of the war. ERC participated successively in any initiative that confronts the Dictatorship.
Transition to democracy and the years of decline (1976–1987)
After the death of General Franco, ERC celebrated in July 1976 the 8th National Congress, in which Barrera was confirmed as leader. In the election to Constituent Cortes of 1977, ERC went into coalition, as it was not yet legalized because of its status as a Republican party. ERC had requested registration in the register of political parties on 14 March of that year, but the Ministry of Interior - a month after the elections - responded: "The name proposed by the entity, referring to a political system incompatible with the one that is legally valid in Spain, can represent an assumption of inadmissibility ". The party tried a coalition with Left Front or with Democratic Convergence, although finally it allied with the Party of Labour of Spain. The name of the electoral coalition was Left of Catalonia–Democratic Electoral Front. The coalition won a seat. Some of the electoral promises were the Statute of Autonomy or a referendum about the Monarchy.In October 1977, President Josep Tarradellas returned to Catalonia and the Generalitat was restored. A new text of the Statute was drafted, which ERC opposed because it did not guarantee a minimum self-government. However, in the referendum for its approval, in 1979, ERC was in favour, as it was the only way to regain autonomy. In the first election to the restored Parliament of Catalonia, in 1980, ERC obtained 14 seats, which brought Barrera to the Presidency of the Parliament of Catalonia. At the crossroads of forming a tripartite with the PSUC and the socialists or favouring Convergència i Unió, Barrera—refractory to alliances with parties from a Marxist tradition—determined ERC would vote Jordi Pujol as president of the Generalitat without compensation and without joining the government, as a gesture of "national unity". In 1984, however, ERC only obtained five deputies, and began a brief period of decline, overshadowed by the hegemony of the center-right Catalan nationalist coalition CiU. This trend persisted during the next years. In 1986, it lost its presence in the Spanish Cortes.
Recovering (1986–1996)
In 1987, the National Call manifesto was published, signed by personalities like Àngel Colom and Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, who wanted ERC to bring together the new generation of independentists that aroses as a result of the disenchantment with the Spanish Transition. The entrance of these young people dynamizes the party, and in the Catalan election of 1988 obtained six seats. In 1989 a new direction led by Àngel Colom assumed the independence of Catalonia as a political aim. As a result of this new orientation, in 1990, the National Front of Catalonia, a historic organization founded in exile in 1940, joined ERC. In 1991, the organization Terra Lliure reconsidered its strategy, and abandoned the armed struggle, where some of its members joined ERC and many of those who formed Catalunya Lliure were incorporated too. These facts turned ERC, de facto, into the reference of the left-wing Catalan independentism.The results obtained in the 1992 election to the Parliament of Catalonia placed ERC as the third political force of Catalonia, with the support of more than 210,000 voters and the obtaining of 11 seats, after a campaign in which, for the first time a party that appeared as a pro-independence party was widely popular. The 18th National Congress of ERC, held in June 1992, approved the reform of its statutes in the face of electoral growth, militancy and territorial presence. ERC advocates in its first statutory article the territorial unity and independence of the Catalan Countries, building its own state within the European framework and together with an ideological position of the left that takes the defense of democracy and environment, human rights and rights of the peoples, and based its ideology and political action on social progress and solidarity.
In the 1993 Spanish general election, ERC recovered its presence in the Congress of Deputies. The same year, Jordi Carbonell and Avel·lí Artís i Gener "Tísner", Left Nationalists members, joined ERC. The local elections of 28 May 1995 represented an important quantitative and qualitative leap of the institutional presence of the party. ERC recovered the presence in many local councils of Catalonia, reaching more than 550 elected councillors and 32 mayors, and thus becomes the third municipal political force. In the 1995 Catalan election, ERC obtained the best result in number of votes since the Republic era, more than 305,000 voters and 13 seats.
In 1996, after a serious internal crisis, Àngel Colom, along with Pilar Rahola left the party and founded the Independence Party. This party, however, had a short life. In the local elections of 1999, they obtained poor results and Pilar Rahola, who presented himself as head of the list in Barcelona, did not obtain a seat. After that, the party was dissolved.