A milion people show their support for the Statute of Autonomy |
The legalisation of political parties following the death of General Franco in 1975 and the proclamation of Juan Carlos I as King of Spain, led to the first Spanish legislative elections which were held on 15 June 1977. The road was opened to democracy. In Catalonia the elections were won by the parties which included the reestablishment of the Generalitat and the return of their exiled President in their electoral programmes. This was done to emphasise the continuity of the Institution, which had symbolically continued in exile. As a result, on 29 September 1977, the Generalitat de Catalunya was reestablished by royal decree and Josep Tarradellas returned to his country after an exile of forty years to be recognised as President of the Generalitat. Shortly thereafter, a commission of experts appointed by the Catalan Assembly composed of Members of Parliament who had been elected in the June 1977 elections began drafting the Statute of Autonomy known, after the place where it was drawn up, as the Statute of Sau.
In December 1978, King Juan Carlos sanctioned the Spanish Constitution before the Cortes Generales. A year later, on 18 December 1979, he also sanctioned the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia which had been approved first by the Spanish Cortes and subsequently by a referendum of the people of Catalonia held in October 1979. According to its preamble, this Statute “is the expression of the collective identity of Catalonia and defines its institutions and relations with the State within a framework of free solidarity with the other nationalities and regions”. In the same document the Generalitat is defined as “the institution around which the self-government of Catalonia is politically organised”.
A historic date in the annals of Catalan democracy was 20 March 1980 when the second legislative elections were held to constitute the new Parliament of Catalonia (the first had been held forty-eight years earlier on 20 November 1932). On 10 April, the Parliament and its deputies elected Heribert Barrera as President of the restored Parliament, and Jordi Pujol i Soley as the hundred-and-fifteenth president of the historic Generalitat.
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