With the bittersweet taste of the last campaign, good results at the polls and a negative balance after the post-electoral pacts, Junts starts the general elections on July 23 with the aspiration of recovering the first position of the independence spectrum. In the municipal ones a few weeks ago, JxCat already surpassed Esquerra and now it wants to do the same… with its sights set on Parliament.
Those of Jordi Turull and Laura Borràs start the race on 23-J at the wheel of Carles Puigdemont and the decision of the General Court of the European Union on his immunity. After the unfavorable ruling for the expresident, the formation tries to alleviate the abstentionist risk of the sovereignist electorate. “The best way to help them [JxCat MEPs] is with the force of the ballot box, the democratic force, the force of our votes”, pointed out the president of the party.
“The Spanish State will only count the independentistas who are going to vote,” Borràs warns. “Demobilization is their victory,” he added. A message that the rest of the leaders who have taken the floor have later seasoned. “The useful vote for Spain is the useless vote for Catalonia”, Turull later concluded, recalling that the “most progressive government in history” has not resolved Catalonia’s problems.
And if Puigdemont is the starter, the main course of the campaign is Miriam Nogueras, leader of Junts in Madrid. The candidate, with the motto “enough is enough”, proposes that nothing will ever be “the same” in Congress for a central government. Her goal is to capitalize on the vote of the “defense of the interests of Catalonia” considering that the Republicans in these four years of negotiations with Moncloa have not obtained revenues.
If governance depends on JxCat and they are decisive, there will be time to debate whether the institutional blockade is more convenient and show a political conflict in the middle of the rotating Spanish presidency of the European Union, or if an advance payment from a hypothetical progressive government is better. But that’s going a lot of screens.
For now, the JxCat candidate for the Senate, Toni Castellà, has sealed this Thursday the “formal commitment not to stabilize any Spanish government that does not recognize the right to self-determination.” “They are scared in Madrid because they know that we are the ones who will put the highest price on each of the votes of the Catalans,” Nogueras assured in this regard. “They know that we will not act as washbasins with the Spanish government”, he concluded from the Palo Alto Market in Barcelona, ??in Poblenou, in a ceremony that had passed through water in which the other heads of the list, Isidre Gavín (Lleida) also participated. , Josep Maria Cruset (Tarragona) and Marta Madrenas (Girona).
“The votes of Junts are not at the service of the PSOE, nor of the PP. They are at the service of Catalonia”, has sentenced the post-convergent candidate, who has reviewed the list of economic grievances, fiscal deficit and investment.
Beyond abstention, the other threat to Junts is the votes that the PDECat-Espai CiU takes. In 2021, in the regional elections, Àngels Chacón’s ballots relegated JxCat to third position, behind ERC, they maintain in the Turull formation. In addition, in the municipal ones, where both brands have competed, there have also been consequences.
What remains to be seen is what role both former president Artur Mas and Xavier Trias will have in the campaign, who have closed ranks with Junts in recent weeks before the division of the post-convergent space into two candidacies.
