La Pobla de Segur (Lleida) renames the street dedicated to Josep Borrell as October 1 after a consultation with a 12% participation

The Pobla de Segur City Council (Lleida) approved on Thursday in a plenary session to change the name of a street dedicated to the socialist politician and current High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, born in this municipality.

The way will be to rename it “First of October”.

With the vote in favor of the councilors of ERC (in the municipal government) and Junts, and the rejection of the three of the PSC, the street will now evoke the date of the sovereignty referendum held in Catalonia in 2017 and which was prohibited by the Constitutional Court.

The decision of yesterday's plenary session was made after a popular consultation that took place last year, in which 250 people (77%) voted in favor of changing the name of the street dedicated to the socialist politician, while 64 ( 20%) were in favor of maintaining it.

Five blank votes and three null votes were also recorded.

In any case, participation in this consultation was reduced to 322 people, only 12% of those over 16 years of age in the city, which has nearly 3,000 inhabitants.

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The councilor and socialist spokesperson, María Ángeles Macaya Miguel, stated that yesterday's plenary session “will be remembered as the day in which a citizen is punished for the mere fact of having expressed his political opinions in public” and added that it was “a "very sad day for democracy and for the population."

Macaya said she was “disappointed to see that ERC councilors ask for freedom of expression, but when push comes to shove they only apply it when they are the ones affected.”

“They practice the harshest arrogance,” she lamented.

Borrell, born in Pobla de Segur in 1947, has always been very critical of the independence movement in Catalonia and in a speech during a demonstration called by the Catalan Civil Society in 2017 he lamented that “coexistence was broken in this country” and that The sovereigntist pretensions went “against the European ideal.”

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