Josep Rull, one of the members of the Generalitat government who went to prison for this trial, He is the new president of a parliament of Catalonia which for the first time in decades has no nationalist majority. With the votes of ERC and CUP, number 3 on the Junts list gains access to the highest position in the Chamber, from which he must decide from the start whether it is Salvador Illa who is running for investiture or whether he is the leader of his party, Carles Puigdemont.
Born in Terrassa, in 1968, few active politicians represent the turn of the old Convergència towards independence positions like Rull. He was a teenager with a Jordi Pujol poster in his room, as he fondly remembers, and since joining the party's youth team at the age of 16, he began to progress alongside the most sovereign generation led by his friend Oriol Pujol.
In fact, Pujol's son led him to the front lines of the game. He had previously led CiU in the Terrassa municipal council and had been a deputy in parliament since 1997. But in 2014, with the departure of Oriol Pujol due to the ITV case, Artur Mas appointed him CDC coordinator.
Valued for his experience in infrastructure policy, in which he specialized as a deputy, Rull was recruited by Puigdemont to join the government as Minister for Territory and Sustainability, a position he took up in October 2017 and for which he served until his pardon served a prison sentence. in 2021. The Supreme Court sentenced him to 10 and a half years for sedition, including for preventing a ship carrying police officers from docking in Palamós.
Rull, one of the few councilors to start work on the day Article 155 was applied, entered the prison away from another party strongman, Jordi Turull, today Junts general secretary. But both figures have taken their relationship in a new direction and have been key figures in building the current party led by Carles Puigdemont.
Outside of the Junts' internal issues, Rull retains notable influence over the various sectors of the party. Puigdemont trusted Puigdemont, although not from his inner circle, but his career and his achievements as a parliamentarian earned him not only the promotion to number 3 of Junt's last 12 million, but also the leadership in the election debates at absence of the former president.
His condition – in the eyes of the independence movement – as a political victim of the process has made him the ideal candidate for the Junts, today the majority power in this room, for an 'anti-repressive' Parliament table. Good knowledge of the functioning of this body of the Chamber, since he was a member of it in the past as secretary, he will now have to lead from the presidency a legislature in which sovereignty will not have a majority, and in which the most important unknown remains who becomes the president.
If it ends up being the Socialist Salvador Illa, the one who has the most options – Puigdemont does not give this up, but he does not have a possible majority – it would be the first time in a long time that the President of Parliament does not belong to the party or the coalition governing the Palau de la Generalitat. The last time was with the socialist Joan Raventós, who got the votes of the PP and the ERC to prevent the position from being taken by CiU, which had just lost its absolute majority.