Republic and first Catalan self-government (1931–1936) After the fall of
Primo de Rivera (1930), 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 (held in
Sants, Barcelona, on 19 March 1931) as the union of the independentist
Estat Català (
Catalan State), 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 (67 of 85), while the previously hegemonic
Regionalist League, representing a more conservative view of Catalan nationalism, came in second place but far behind ERC (17 from 85). 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 (PNRE). 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 (CEDA) as ministers in the Government of the Spanish Republic, Companys unlawfully declared a
Catalan State "within a Spanish Federal Republic" (which, of course, did not at that time exist). 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 (including Companys himself) and Catalan officials were tried by the Supreme Court of the Republic, receiving jail sentences, while the
Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia was suspended (until February 1936). 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, (called ''Front d'Esquerres'', "Left Front" in Catalan) 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 (POUM) and the pro-Soviet
Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), 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 (Prime Minister) 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 (along with all other participants in the
Popular Front) 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 (1975), 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 (
Esquerra de Catalunya-Front Electoral Democràtic). The coalition won a seat (Barrera). Some of the electoral promises were the Statute of Autonomy or a referendum about the Monarchy. In October 1977, President
Josep Tarradellas (a founder of the party in 1931) 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 (out of a total of 135), 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 (CiU), Barrera—refractory to alliances with parties from a Marxist tradition—determined ERC would vote
Jordi Pujol (CiU) 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.
New era with Carod Rovira and return to the Government In November 1996, the 21st National Congress of ERC was held. The militants chose a new direction for the party, with
Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira as new president and Joan Puigcercós as new general secretary. The new direction announced some changes on the strategy: it does not renounce the independence of Catalonia, but it stops using that idea as the only reference. The new direction wanted to place the party as the new reference of the Catalan left. On 16 November 2003, in the
election to the Parliament of Catalonia, ERC obtained 23 seats, becoming the "key party" that would define the composition of the government, since to obtain the majority the other parties were obliged to agree with ERC. After several weeks in which it seemed that he would close an agreement with CiU (center-right and nationalist party), it finally opted for a "progressive pact" (called the Pact of the Tinell or popularly the "Tripartit") with the
Socialists' Party of Catalonia and the ecosocialist coalition
ICV-EUiA. ERC became part of the tripartite government of the Generalitat, chaired by the socialist
Pasqual Maragall, assuming six government departments, among which the "Conseller en Cap" (
Prime Minister), belonging to Carod-Rovira. The other five ministries assumed by ERC were Education (
Josep Bargalló), Welfare and Family (
Anna Simó), Commerce, Tourism and Consumption (
Pere Esteve), Government and Public Administration (
Joan Carretero) and Universities, Research and Information Society (
Carles Solà). In addition, another ERC leader,
Ernest Benach, was elected President of the Parliament. Despite having been one of the main forces behind the movement for amendment, the party eventually opposed the 2006 changes to the
Catalan Statute of Autonomy to increase Catalonia's autonomy. It did so on the grounds that it did not do enough to increase Catalan self-government. This caused a government crisis with its partners (specially with the PSC) which led to an
early election in 2006. After 2006, the three original coalition partners remade the coalition, this time led by the socialist
José Montilla who became President of the Generalitat on 28 November of that year. This time the coalition was significantly more stable and it was voted out of power
in 2010, given the coalition's poor management of the
2008 Great Recession and
Spanish housing market crash.
Procés and pro-independence governments On 27 June 2010, the
Spanish Constitutional Court published the ruling on the 2006 Catalan Statute of Autonomy. The ruling slashed significant parts of the text and made the law voted and passed by the Catalan public in a
referendum null and void. This, alongside the growing instability brought by the 2008 financial crisis, fueled a growing
independence movement in the country. After the party's poor results in the
2010 Catalan election and an electoral domination by the center-right
CiU, then President
Artur Mas called for a snap vote to receive a mandate to pursue independence. In this election, celebrated
in 2012, ERC achieved a historical feat and beat the
PSC in seats and became the second-largest party in the Catalan Parliament running on a purely pro-independence platform. After this, CiU and ERC, two of the three pro-independence parties in the Catalan Parliament, articulated a majority to form a
CiU minority government with the explicit mandate to organize a non-binding referendum. This materialized in 2014 with what was then called the
Procés Participatiu 9N (in English:
Participative Process November 9th) which was ruled illegal by Spanish Courts. The pro-independence option won this non-binding popular inquiry by a large margin, given with little-to-no turnout by unionist voters. Despite these results, the
Spanish government refused to approve a binding and legal referendum on independence and the pro-independence movement pushed for a unitary candidacy in another snap election. This snap election was considered to be a plebiscite on independence and a legal way to ask the Catalan people about the issue without needing the Spanish Government's permission. ERC led the coalition talks, often as a bridge between the center-right
CDC and the far-left
CUP, which had significant disagreements. In the end, the CUP contested the election alone and the pro-independence unitary coalition was formed only by CDC, ERC and some pro-independence factions of the PSC,
ICV,
UDC. The name given to this coalition, which also integrated many non-politicians, was
Junts pel Sí (in English:
Together for the Yes). After the
2015 catalan election, Junts pel Sí emerged victorious with 62 seats, 37 more than the second-most voted option. Among these, ERC and ERC-alligned independents held 21 seats. However, the coalition came 6 seats short of a majority and needed the CUP's 10 seats' support to form government. After arduous coalition talks, the CUP allowed the formation of a
CDC-ERC coalition government on the condition that Artur Mas, the until-then de facto leader of the Procés stepped aside. This permitted the investiture of
Carles Puigdemont and the return of ERC to government, 5 years after the loss of the leftist tripartite coalition. ERC had 5 cabinet members and its leader,
Oriol Junqueras, became
Vicepresident of the Generalitat.This new government assumed the task of organizing a binding independence referendum before 2018. Tasks started right away, always with fierce opposition from both the Spanish Courts and the Spanish Central Government. The 9th of June of 2017, President Puigdemont accompanied by ERC's leader Vicepresident Junqueras unveiled the date and question of
the referendum, which was set to take place October 1st 2017, with or without the permission of the Spanish Government. This prompted a reaction by the Spanish Courts, which declared the referendum illegal and issued warrants to stop the vote by any means necessary. Ballot boxes and ballots were targeted, Catalan Government offices were raided, websites were expropriated and pro-independence civil leaders were jailed. These actions were unsuccessful in stopping the vote and the referendum was held as scheduled. Both the
Spanish National Police and the
Guardia Civil were sent to physically stop Catalan citizens from voting, some coming to Catalonia from elsewhere in Spain chanting "a por ellos" (english: "''let's get them''"). This resulted in a violent crackdown by the Spanish Police on voters, many of which sustaining injuries. Despite this, many votes were counted and the pro-independence option won by a landslide, again with a boycott by unionist voters. Subsequently, the Catalan Government presented a motion on independence on the 27th of October of 2017 in the Catalan Parliament, which passed. This declaration however was never published in the
Official Diary of the Generalitat de Catalunya and, years later, pro-independence leaders would qualify it as "symbolic". After this declaration, the
Spanish Senate passed the application of the 155th article of the
Spanish Constitution, which suspended Catalan autonomy and forcefully removed from office the sitting Catalan Government. Additionally, all Catalan government members which stayed on Spanish soil were jailed, including Vicepresident Oriol Junqueras and the rest of ERC's cabinet members. The Spanish Government called for another
snap election in December 2017 to restore Catalan self-rule. ERC, without a free leader, chose to still run the jailed Oriol Junqueras while the General Secretary of the party,
Marta Rovira, assumed his functions both organically and institutionally. This resulted on a third place with 32 seats, a historical high since
Spain's return to democracy. Pro-independence parties renewed their absolute majority and ERC and
Junts per Catalunya, CDC's heir, formed a coalition government with the CUP's external support. Before this renewed coalition could assume power, Marta Rovira was also involved in the Referendum judicial case and came under serious threat of being jailed. Given this, she chose exile to Switzerland.
Pere Aragonès, former leader of the
Young Republican Left of Catalonia, became vicepresident of the Generalitat representing ERC, with Junts per Catalunya's
Quim Torra assuming the presidency. ERC appointed 7 cabinet members, most notably the
Catalan Health Minister. This cabinet led Catalonia, which has competences over heath policy, through the
pandemic. ERC's
Alba Vergés, as Health Minister, held a significant leadership position. The cabinet's pandemic management was considered successful, albeit on the restrictive side. On September 28th 2020, the
Supreme Court of Spain ratified Quim Torra's inhabilitation due to his disobedience in not removing a banner in support to the Catalan jailed politicians from the Palau de la Generalitat. He was subsequently forcefully removed from power and the Vicepresident of the Generalitat, ERC's Pere Aragonès, became interim president. This was the first time since the
Second Spanish Republic that a member of Republican Left of Catalonia assumed the powers of the presidency. In 2021,
a new Catalan election was held, the first one on schedule since 2010. In this election ERC surpassed
Junts and became the largest pro-independence party in the chamber, even tying for first place in seats with a resurgent PSC. Pro-independence parties renewed their majority in seats, and for the first time in history, in votes. This led to coalition talks, which resulted in a ERC led pro-independence government with Junts as a junior partner and the CUP's external support. In May 2021, Pere Aragonès became the first ERC President of the Generalitat since 1978. In October 2022, after less than 2 years, the coalition fell through and Junts left the Catalan executive leading to a widespread government restructuring and leaving ERC as the sole party in power in the country. This minority government struggled to pass legislation, and most notably, to approve a budget. Despite this, they started many legislative processes, such as the National Agreement for the Language, the Statute of Rural Municipalities and the Neighbourhoods and Towns Plan, however, none of these came to fruition during the government's tenure.In the end, in March 2024, following the fall-through of negotiations with the
Comuns for the approval of the 2024 budget, President Aragonès resigned and called for a snap election for April of that same year.
End of the Procés and new tripartite coalition In the
May 2024 election, ERC lost 13 seats and became the third largest party in the Catalan Parliament, losing the Presidency of the Generalitat. Pro-independence parties fell short of a majority for the first time since 2012 and the coalition that had governed the country for 12 years became impossible. After a few months of negotiations, ERC supported
Salvador Illa's candidacy to become President of the Generalitat alongside
Comuns Sumar. This support was given in exchange for major advances in Catalonia's sovereignty and self-rule, most notably a
federalized tax system, as well as the PSC's explicit commitment to the defence of Catalonia's status as a nation and the Catalan language. This agreement was later ratified by the PSOE as well, ensuring support in the Spanish Congress. In August 2024, the PSC formed its first minority government in history, however with external support from its traditional partners of the tripartite leftist coalition, the largest of which is ERC. As of December 2025, ERC and the PSC have failed to reach an agreement regarding budget because none of the major concessions to Catalonia promised by the PSC have yet been realized. Despite this, both party's relationship is considered 'in good health' given the PSC efforts to fulfill the promises it made to the republicans. == Ideology ==