Of the little more than 351,000 votes that the Catalan independence movement as a whole loses in the municipal elections on Sunday, 302,000 are lost by ERC, the party that governs the Generalitat today, the one that has had the most prominence as a partner of the Executive of Pedro Sánchez, the one who insists in the path negotiated for a referendum, and the one who managed to be the first force in votes and councilors in the local elections of 2019, when he also won in Barcelona, ​​something unprecedented since the transition. The Republicans have been gaining an apparent political centrality after October 2017 and now they receive serious warning.
In the ERC leadership, the debate is intense and, in addition, it occurs under the pressure of the call for the general elections on July 23. Why are there so many people who have stopped voting this time for Oriol Junqueras’s party? This is the cursed question for ERC, a question that requires more time and peace of mind than those concerned have.
Automatically, the first reaction is to doubt the strategy followed after the collapse of the process. Something that has gripped ERC since it tried to become a big party – like the PSC or Convergència was – is the excessive insecurity of its leaders when they make far-reaching decisions. It is a legacy of the years when it was a small party. In addition, it is notable how sensitive the ERC environments are to certain criticisms of the CUP, the commons, or Junts, more recently.
If the abstention of so many Republican voters were due to an explicit rejection of the strategy of the Junqueras-Aragonès tandem, it would be logical that Junts and the CUP would have grown, but this has not been the case. The initials of Borràs and Turull lose a little more than 6,000 ballots and the anti-capitalists lose a little more than 40,000 votes.
What are ERC voters who have stayed at home saying? You have to decipher the gesture. President Aragonès has opted for a quick response, which is inspired by the axiomatic: noise and constant brawls demotivate. Hence, he suggests a new framework for greater cooperation between pro-independence forces, in the face of agonizing elections.
Without denying that the demobilization of many ERC voters may be due to the division and reproaches in the independence bloc (something that does not take its toll on Puigdemont supporters), I suspect that this is too reminiscent of the joke about looking for lost keys wherever illuminate the streetlight Beyond the local casuistry, responses must be tested in a field of subtleties, where the disappointment that the process has generated lives.
This being the case, why does abstention now attack ERC and not in the last regional ones? Due to what the experts call the loss of focus: after voting to achieve express independence, after voting to show Rajoy and the State that the cause was still alive, and after voting to maintain an independentist Government, these 300,000 found no motivation to take again the ERC ballot. When the citizen does not know exactly what his vote is for, he stops voting. Neither the dialogue table, nor the proposal for clarity, nor the policies of the Generalitat, nor the parliamentary incidence in Madrid have been encouraging. Nor pardons.
Are we facing something specific or will it be repeated in the generals? The very identity of ERC is at stake. Beneath the cursed question lies another, much more difficult one: What can a party whose historical objective is located today in an indeterminate tomorrow offer to excite its electorate?
