In 1980, Jordi Pujol was elected president of the Generalitat of Catalonia for the first time. He did not win these elections with an absolute majority, he governed thanks to the abstentions of the UCD and the ERC. His presidency will be extended during successive elections until 2003, those of 1984, 1988 and 1992 with an absolute majority. During these years he succeeded in ensuring that the pujolism was associated with Catalonia, without it Catalonia would not exist. The belief in this symbiosis lasted for many years.
However, complaints against him soon began. In 1984, the Catalan banks affairone appeared. The state attorney general’s office filed a criminal complaint against him. However, on November 21, 1986, the plenary assembly of the Territorial Court of Barcelona voted by 33 votes to eight against his prosecution for his management as director of Banca Catalana. They exonerated him, and not only did this have no political consequences for him, but it also led a good part of the Catalans to consider that the “attack” against Pujol was an attack against Catalonia. More than a hundred thousand people took to the streets to show their support. When was today no honorable moultdeclared from the balcony of the Generalitat: “The central government has made an unworthy gesture; from now on we will talk about ethics and morality.”
Maintaining this passionately narcissistic and nationalist discourse led him to win the following elections. There was no more respected politician at that time, and from Felipe González to José María Aznar, who eventually spoke Catalan in private, everyone agreed with him. In the following years, Pujol maintained his political hegemony in Catalonia without problem.
So much so that the Pujols believed themselves to be “owners of Catalonia” and they made a good part of the population believe that in 2015, their story of honesty had already been broken after confessing that they had had and enjoyed a fortune hidden abroad, when Marta Ferrusola was called to testify in the Parliament of Catalonia in the commission of inquiry into her family for tax fraud, uncomfortable with the questions of the deputies, she did not hesitated to say: “Catalonia is not mereix això. In other words: we, the Pujols, are Catalonia. To question us is to question Catalonia.
Today, in 2025, at age 95, and after years of judicial and police investigations, despite his prosecution, we still do not see Pujol sitting in the dock with his seven children. Finally, he connected via video conference from his home with the National Court to participate in the trial over the origin of his family’s hidden fortune. That’s something, even if it must have been 45 years since the Bank of Spain first sent its inspectors to the Banca Catalana, in October 1980. Longer than the Franco dictatorship lasted.
To what extent they are tainted and with whom, these 23 years of power in Catalonia will be decided in a few months, but what is indisputable is not that Jordi Pujol has many years to be tried or go to prison, but that they have managed to ensure that many years pass so that he can no longer be tried or go to prison.
Perhaps we, the Catalans, deserve someone to explain to us the reason for this suspicious gradual postponement of the case. Times can also be a legal form of impunity.
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