The Puigdemont effect can now be counted: 35 seats, the victory on the pro-independence flank due to the collapse of ERC and the only wild card in the destabilizing capacity of Pedro Sánchez’s Government. The story of restitution is not enough to recover the mobilization of the independence voter, diluted like the process. The former president promised that he would return to Parliament for an investiture debate even if he was not the presidential candidate but would not occupy a seat in the opposition. Return home and nothing more?
Without a pro-independence majority and with the possibility of a left-wing tripartite, at the Junts headquarters in Argelers they wondered if the Republicans, losing thirteen seats, will throw themselves into the arms of Salvador Illa for the simple fact of punishing Carles Puigdemont. ERC’s response was blunt: there will be no tripartite. The internal division of the Republicans has stopped being buried and, without the presidency of the Generalitat, Oriol Junqueras will put an end to the artificial bicephaly of the last legislature.
Under the watchful eye of Junqueras, Pere Aragonès publicly admitted the “very bad” results, assumed personal and collective “responsibilities” and ruled out the tripartite. “We will continue our work in the opposition.” Without the Republicans in the sum of a left-wing government, the hypothesis of electoral repetition comes into play and in ERC they speculate with a hypothetical candidacy of Junqueras if the Amnesty law allowed it.
That the blockade forces a return to the polls would be an escape for Junts in the short term. Its result falls short despite having the former president’s face on the ballot and adding one hundred thousand votes compared to the previous elections. Junts may have been reborn as a party, it has unapologetically claimed Jordi Pujol and Artur Mas, but the magic has ended and the post-convergence has not managed to awaken the pro-independence voters who are already active in abstention or compensate for the 143,000 that ERC and have lost. the CUP.
The only victory of the night is the humiliation of the Republican opponent and the reminder that his seven votes in Congress are necessary to guarantee Sánchez’s government. That is the play that Puigdemont has left. The former president attributes the independence punishment to disunity and the lack of a shared strategy and reaches out to ERC to rebuild bridges that have been blown up time and again. The umpteenth call for unity is the basis of a new move: presenting the 55 deputies of Junts and ERC compared to the 48 of the socialists and commons and imagining an abstention of the PSC in exchange for Sánchez’s survival.
Whoever was in charge of CDC in 2006 knows that knocking on the door of Moncloa asking for the submission of the PSC is not a good idea when the presidency of the Generalitat is at stake. But the Puigdemontistas reply that never before had a PSC candidate depended so much on the PSOE, and Sánchez’s PSOE…
