“Being from the PP of Catalonia is not an easy thing.” The candidate, Alejandro Fernández, has said it many times in this campaign, thanking those who left his party and returned, and especially those who have endured a difficult journey through the desert. The Popular Party bordered on starvation within the framework of the process, and tomorrow it aspires to leave that journey far behind. It thus aspires to strong growth to influence the Parliament, being the referential voice of “constitutionalism”, a substantial advance also to get closer to the Moncloa.
Yesterday there was relative calm in the headquarters of the popular Catalans. The polls that in recent days point to the strength of Vox are worrying, they have a Spanish reading – the longer Vox endures, the less the PP will be able to distance itself from the PSOE in the European elections – but it was also highlighted that there are polls that do not offer this portrait. . Quadrupling the result – starting from the meager 3 seats – is a possible scenario that was being considered yesterday at the popular headquarters. And achieve fourth place The appeal not to divide the vote was the main message of the campaign closing rally.
Be that as it may, the die is cast after a campaign with a mainly moderate tone in which the PP has sought to establish itself as the reference force against the independence movement and the PSC, trying to make it complicit – with Pedro Sánchez as a reference – in the revitalization of the process: “throw out the independence movement and sanchismo and open a new stage.”
A double-sided campaign axis because this “processist” package has been linked to the loss of Catalonia’s economic and social momentum. Alejandro Fernández has defended a liberal program, very focused on the search for economic and investment reactivation based on a reduction in taxation in Catalonia. In this “decadence” that has been attributed to the process, special emphasis has been placed on the “failure” of the educational system and the need to improve security and the fight against illegal occupations.
Economy, security, education are the axes of the message that have also come from the hand of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who has been unreservedly involved in the Catalan campaign, with 12 rallies in the last 15 days. The president of the PP knows that if he wants to reach Moncloa it is essential to improve the result in the general elections in Catalonia, which also means closing the gap with the PSC. And last July it became clear. By a very small margin, two more seats that would have turned the presidency of the Government around were not obtained.
The PP’s strategy has sought to strengthen what Feijóo has described as “the return to Catalonia”. A return that wants to be the beginning of a growing project and a greater and different involvement. The absorption of a good part of the Ciudadanos vote, with 6 seats, is taken for granted. And at the borders there are difficulties. On the one hand, part of the vote that de C’s went to the PSC has been sought, but Sánchez’s mistake with his resignation has been able to serve to bring together the socialist vote. On the right flank, the central event was held in Badalona with Xavier García Albiol as the protagonist, and likewise, the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has been in the four Catalan provinces. The fight for the right flank was staged above all with the rally of Ayuso and Alejandro Fernández in Plaza Artós, the bastion of the young Vox vote.
Feijóo made a brief foray along this border when in Cornellà he linked the occupation of homes with illegal immigration. But here he remained. The campaign, led by Dolors Montserrat, has mobilized militancy. The question is whether their voters, who in Catalonia are less active and in a climate of electoral fatigue, are also mobilized.