“It’s the last bullet, if we don’t go in this time it will be increasingly difficult.” In the PDECat they are aware that the future is partly at stake at the polls tomorrow and they will do so with the trump card of Roger Montañola as a candidate and with the Espai CiU brand and the open appeal to the policies of Convergència i Unió – proof of this is that on Thursday the group went to Montserrat where the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) was founded in 1974. All this, however, with a much more liberal accent than that of the nationalist federation that led the Generalitat for 23 years in a row with Jordi Pujol and another five with Artur Mas, who now supports Junts.
The formation of David Bonvehí competes with 100% of the electoral rights of the JxCat coalition of 2019, but in 2021, in the Parliamentary elections, that advantage was of no use to them: Despite obtaining more than 70,000 votes with former Minister Àngels Chacón as leader and having the rights, they remained as an extra-parliamentary force.
With these wickers, the fear in the party is to stay again at the gates of obtaining representation. If they do not get seats in the Congress of Deputies, they know that in the future everything will be much more complicated since they will not have electoral rights or guaranteed spaces in the media sphere in the next electoral appointments, although they have more than 180 councilors and five mayors spread throughout the Catalan geography with the Ara Pacte Local coalition.
Under the emblem of Espai CiU, this time various actors from the diaspora that originated the lowering of the CDC blind seven years ago, some in a more active way than others, parade. Be that as it may, the space of the Catalan and moderate center that has been tried to articulate several times after October 2017, a force that can unite both pro-independence supporters and non-independence supporters, now has an opportunity to ring the bell, raise its head and lay the foundations to persist and grow.
The fact that Junts has Míriam Nogueras as a candidate instead of another candidate who withdrew from the primary race, Jaume Giró, plays in favor of those from Bonvehí, who are aware that with the ex-minister they would have it even more difficult. Against him is the election of the candidate, Montañola, who took place at the last moment and without having been able to promote him and identify him with the brand in time, despite being known for his time as a CiU deputy and his facet as a commentator in various media.
Of the Catalan forces, the PDECat is the only one willing to negotiate with both the PP and the PSOE, under the motto “we are going to do politics” and the demand that they “respect Catalonia and go through the cash register”, with Vox as the only red line to get along with the popular.
With Montañola at the helm, the candidacy concludes the process and calls for a return to the years of the peix al cove, with proclamations such as “better peix al cove than res al cove (better fish in the basket than nothing in the basket) or “better Puta i Ramoneta than procés”.
In addition, the formation calls for lowering taxes in Catalonia and advocates a foral regime similar to that of Euskadi and Navarra for Catalonia in the reform of the regional financing system, to put an end to the fiscal deficit.
There are those who believe that the speech that is being made now should have been made at the time when there was a divorce between the PDECat and Waterloo, in the summer of 2020, but the ties were still very much alive and the prisoners of the process were still behind bars.
The will expressed by Montañola is that no matter what happens Espai CiU goes ahead, but without resources it is difficult to survive the political jungle. Entering the Lower House would be a new cartridge, a balloon of oxygen.
