Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Alejandro Fernández met yesterday in Madrid to discuss the Catalan candidacy for the 12-M, which is expected to be made public today. According to sources from the national leadership of the Popular, the meeting “served to share their vision on the current political context both in Catalonia and in Spain as a whole. During the meeting, the Catalan president conveyed his absolute readiness to the party”.
The national leadership of the People’s Party, which has a great internal debate about who should be the electoral poster in Catalonia, also reported that yesterday evening the consultations with the Catalan People’s Party would be exhausted in order to transmit the decision to public opinion. In this context of an imminent outcome, Alejandro Fernández indicated on social networks that he had communicated to Feijóo “his absolute disposition”. “As a candidate for the Generalitat – he continued – or as a grassroots affiliate, I will always help in everything I can so that the PP of Catalonia obtains the best possible result”.
The national leadership’s indecision about the Catalan candidacy has been, above all, due to Feijóo’s lack of harmony with the Catalan leader, due to the public considerations he has made about some of the formation’s strategies. In the months before the Catalan election, attempts were made to make a rapprochement. But the electoral progress has caught the populists, who were also debating in the medium term a progressive turn towards the Catalan center. Hence the doubts about whether to maintain the candidacy of Alejandro Fernández or to make a renewal now. Several names have been placed on the table as electoral posters, especially that of Dolors Montserrat, spokesperson for the PPE.
The PP had indicated that the election of the Catalan candidate, which by statute depends on the national leadership, would be made as soon as the negotiation with Ciutadans was closed. The two formations were looking for an electoral integration that failed on Friday, and therefore the door was already open to the designation of the number one in Catalonia. The Catalan PP had also communicated the need to clarify unknowns in order to start the pre-campaign strongly. It’s been almost two weeks since President Pere Aragonès announced the advance and the election date, and the Catalan PP has put the thread on the needle to debate the rest of the list, which is indeed their responsibility. The main Catalan formations, with the exception of the popular Catalans, have nominated their candidates and on the first weekend they already launched themselves into the political arena.
For this reason, yesterday morning the spokesman Borja Sémper already advanced that the decision would be taken very soon and that the Catalan leaders would be consulted. But in fact, this consultation has been going on for weeks and has been long and complex. There is a disparity of criteria not only in a matter of mere strategy, but also of the internal organization of the party, and therefore of the impact of any decision.
The PP had pending the celebration of the congress in Catalonia, which had been left until after the European elections of 9-J. A design thought from the national leadership with the idea that the autonomous regions would not be at least until after summer For this reason, from sectors of the party it has been considered that now was not the time to make hasty changes.
Aside from these considerations, Sémper analyzed the Amnesty law, the other front opened by the PP in the offensive against the central government, in a Catalan way. The popular spokesman assured that with the Amnesty law Spain “attends the return to point zero, the beginning of the pro-independence process”, after the investiture agreement between the PSOE and Junts and ERC. “The rule of law and Catalan society deactivated the process and Sánchez is reactivating it. This is the sad reality we find ourselves in today”, said Sémper, who highlighted the appeal presented by the PSC before the Constitutional Court, to which the Spanish Executive has added, against the legislative initiative popular (ILP) in favor of independence admitted to Parliament.
