With a peculiar campaign, in which the majority of events will be in Argelers, in the south of France, and behind Carles Puigdemont Junts faces the parliamentary election campaign with the expectation of overtaking Salvador Illa, who is now first in the race according to the polls, and leave behind his former partner, Esquerra, to have primacy in the independence spectrum and once again lead the Government of the Generalitat, with a speech that combines management – ??“good government” – with the demand for the nation and Catalan.
In the previous path, with this purpose, the formation has tried to polarize the contest between the leader of the PSC and even the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the post-convergent candidate, which Puigdemont himself fueled this Thursday at the initial rally at assure that on May 12 “there are only two options” and that he “is going for all of them.” Thus, the party relies on the Puigdemont effect to beat the socialists.
The former president has promised that he will return to Catalonia for the investiture debate whatever the result and has already put on the table the cards with which he intends to play the game in the next legislature: Agree, if possible, on the formation of the executive with ERC although other issues can be negotiated with the rest of the Parliament’s forces.
In the next 15 days Junts will hold most of the rallies in the same space in the town where the second Junts congress was held two years ago and the formation’s leadership was renewed. In that conclave, Puigdemont and Jordi Sànchez, who were president and general secretary of the party, handed over the baton to Laura Borràs and Jordi Turull respectively. The former president remained in the background at an organic level, but in recent months, after the negotiation with the PSOE for Sánchez’s investiture and the Amnesty law, he has returned to the front line. A circumstance that has just been consolidated with the candidacy in the Catalan race of Puigdemont, who in the first act has shown his chest for the approval of the Amnesty law and for the negotiation in Switzerland with the PSOE. “We have broken the coalition of no [of PP and PSOE] and the no to the amnesty when Junts has been decisive,” proclaimed the former president, who has therefore reproached the sovereigntists who advocate abstention and who defended it in the previous electoral cycle.
Likewise, the former president has warned that the PSC, if JxCat wins, “will take the votes of the PP if it needs them”, in reference to the maneuver that deprived Xavier Trias of the mayor of Barcelona in June. He has also rejected the “attempts to Spanishize the campaign” and has asserted that “these elections are about Catalonia.” “We are risking the future of the nation and our language,” he countered.
In another order of things, Junts starts the campaign with the explicit support of former president Jordi Pujol, who had shown a gradual approach to JxCat and 24 hours before the official start of the electoral race revealed that he will vote for Puigdemont and blessed the post-convergent formation as the party that most resembles the extinct Convergència. The step that Pujol has taken is mutual in Junts, which at first renounced the convergent legacy and ultimately in the political argument has assumed many postulates of the formation that Pujol founded at the sector level, in aspects such as taxation, for example. . Furthermore, the turquoise green color characteristic of Junts has been buried by the blue that characterized the nationalist federation in the past and that Puigdemont’s party defines as “institutional.”
