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Good morning,
Today there is exactly one month left until the elections are held in Catalonia and the strange situation arises that the party that is in government is the one that makes the most proposals and the one that is most active in this pre-campaign. Pere Aragonès does not stop. To the proposal for singular financing, the activation of the referendum or the creation of a department for Catalan, has been added his participation this week in the debate of autonomous communities in the Senate and, after long months of reflection, his commitment on how The expansion of the El Prat airport must be addressed.
The most common thing in an electoral campaign is for the parties that are in the opposition to be the main agitators and present all the initiatives that they would like to promote if they reach the government. On the other hand, the party in power plays more defensively and explains what it has done more than what it has to do. But perhaps because with their slim majority they have been able to do little, or because of the fear of being left behind in the electoral contest, the Republicans fire electoral ammunition daily and their candidate is the most active in the media.
His electoral rivals, on the other hand, are barely noticeable. The socialist candidate, Salvador Illa, who appears ahead in most of the polls, has chosen to appear just until yesterday’s big campaign event, which can be considered his electoral debut, with a large presence of VIPs from around the world. economic. Illa seems as if he wants the elections to go unnoticed and be held this Sunday. As if he were afraid of waking up a sleeping pro-independence voter and wanted to win by making the essential noise. He remembers Jordi Pujol’s campaigns in the eighties, which were marked by a low tone so that his own people went to vote and that voters who did not agree with his nationalist theses stayed at home. It is only necessary to review the high abstention rates in the Generalitat elections compared to the general or municipal elections in the four Catalan constituencies to verify this.
And Carles Puigdemont does not seem to have the desire to campaign much, nor to go down and complicate his life in the electoral brawl. The Junts leader will not participate in any electoral debate and places himself above good and evil. In the interview given this week to Jordi Basté on RAC1, the first he has granted after the decision to present himself as a candidate, he already made it very clear that he is not up for debates with Illa or Aragonès.
Puigdemont has already placed his message: that of the restitution of his status as president. The next question should be “and to do what?”, but this idea is no longer formulated. It doesn’t seem to be something fundamental in his argument. Illa, for her part, has also launched his key idea: turning the page on the process. They are two clear and clear messages that try to lead to two different realities in Catalonia. Esquerra, on the other hand, has the risk of staying in the middle. Maybe that’s why it makes so much noise.
And after the Catalan elections, the European elections will come. The EU countries already live in a climate marked by this vote that could generate a turn in European history if the great Christian Democrat family chooses to replace its traditional alliance with socialists and liberals with a pact with the far-right formations that are in vogue. . This atmosphere influences many of the decisions that are made these days. This week, the European Parliament has approved the controversial and complex Migration and Asylum Pact that is going to create a lot of queues. The agreement tightens entry controls for migrants and speeds up expulsion processes. The NGOs have already come out to say that this agreement is based on xenophobic ideas.
The climate that exists among the European institutions is also palpable in the report that the Twenty-seven are finalizing as a roadmap to face the coming years. Defense spending is prioritized and environmental policy is softened due to pressure from the agricultural sectors. A significant change in the policies followed to date.
But there is life beyond politics. This month’s guest at Foros de Vanguardia was not a member of the Administration or any party leader, but the prestigious oncologist Joan Massagué, who gave a brilliant dissertation on that unnameable disease, whose name seems to be hidden: cancer. It was nice to see reflected in the assembly hall the interview published 33 years ago by a young Massagué at the hands of a young Josep Corbella in La Vanguardia and repeating the same idea that “as long as there is life, there will be cancer.”
Happy Friday.
