But ERC President Oriol Junqueras has come back with all his eyes: at first, by a letter on the party’s web last Tuesday, he announced that he was ready to continue in office, but after a long and tough leadership on Wednesday he announced his withdrawal after the European Parliament elections.

As can be seen in the chronicles of the Catalan media, Aragones and General Secretary Marta Rovira have pressured Junqueras to, at least now, step back. And Junqueras has gone back, but it all points out that he has gained strength and made a new leap forward.

The ERC has already announced that a conference will be held on 30 November to set the strategy for the coming years and to select the direction that will guide this new path. For the time being, Junqueras has shown his willingness to continue running the party.

The road, however, will not be easy because within the party there are sectors that consider that the whole current direction should be abandoned. Elections to the European Parliament will be held on 9 June and Junqueras is not a candidate, but the majority believes that it will have a major role in the election campaign and will seek to gather support in the party. Few question that if he gets support, in November he competes for leadership.

Mirror of internal conflicts 2008

Oriol Junqueras, president of ERC since 2011, has had two important supports in his leadership: he has guided the steps of ERC along with Marta Rovira, general secretary of the party for the entire duration of the procés. Following the Swiss exile of Rovira and the Junqueras prison, Pere Aragones assumed the public and institutional leadership of the ERC. It is said that in recent years Aragon and Junqueras have shared the leadership of the party, but they have also moved away. Rovira maintains internal party control. Now, both Aragon and Rovira press Junqueras to take a step back.

The ERC has experienced glorious times over the last fifteen years, but it is common practice for any party that receives this electoral failure to move on the slope of the crisis. In this case, it also fell from the poor results of the previous Spanish municipal and general elections.

In this port, many think of the complicated time of the late 2000s. In 2008, Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira was running the party and in those elections the ERC dropped from 652,000 to 296,000 votes. As a result, Joan Puigcercos took the command staff, but two years later in the autonomous elections the ERC dropped from 21 to 10 seats and then Junqueras arrived.

During these days, he's writing a lot about CKD, and these two articles offer interesting clues about what's going on. They are two different views of the Republican party: one written by Joan Serra, a journalist from Nacional Digital who closely follows the details of the ERC, and the other by Lola García, attached to the director of La Guerra.