“We are in a completely different time, in a new time,” Pedro Sánchez warned yesterday about the new electoral candidacy of Carles Puigdemont. “Catalan citizens, on May 12, have a dilemma to resolve with their vote: whether they want a Catalonia that looks forward or a Catalonia that looks backward,” said the President of the Government. Past, therefore, or future.
Despite being at that moment already immersed in the always intense negotiations of the European Council meeting in Brussels, Sánchez acknowledged yesterday that he did not take his eye off the intervention in which Puigdemont confirmed the day before, from the French town of Elna, that he will attend again as candidate for the Catalan elections.
And before and after Puigdemont’s announcement, in any case, Sánchez said the same thing to downplay his candidacy for 12-M: “It is the third time he has run, he already did it in 2017 and in 2021,” he recalled. .
The former president of the Generalitat did not win the elections on any of these occasions. In fact, in the Moncloa they highlight that in the last appointment with the polls he was in third position, behind the PSC and ERC.
Sánchez also assured that, according to his forecasts, the Barometer of the Center d’Estudis d’Opinió (CEO, the Catalan CIS) fell short, despite triggering the electoral expectations of the PSC candidate, former minister Salvador Illa. “He is going to win by a wide margin, even more than what these demographic studies say,” he confided.
“Catalan citizens want to turn the page,” Sánchez stressed. And that means having a president of the Generalitat, in reference to Illa, “who unites and serves the entire Catalan citizenry.”
Regardless of what one candidate or another says, he pointed out in reference to Puigdemont’s commitment to successfully completing the independence process that began in October 2017, “the important thing is to look to the future, and have a president who is dedicated to things, as Illa says.” The PSC, he remarked, “has the leader that Catalonia needs.”
The head of the Executive thus described the Catalan socialists as a “winning proposal”, by putting the strengthening of public services at the center of their political project, to face the drought, education and public health or reindustrialization, in addition to promotion of self-government in Catalonia.
In this sense, Sánchez warned that despite the threat of drought, the last desalination plant that opened was in 2005. “We have to get on with things,” the President of the Government prescribed.
“We are going to have an extraordinary result, even superior to what the polls indicate,” insisted Sánchez, who assured that the socialists go to 12-M with “a lot of optimism.” “And therefore we will have the opportunity to open a new time in Catalonia,” he stressed.
