The key to these general elections for ERC is trying to convince voters that the dichotomy between PSOE-Sumar and PP-Vox harbors other preferences. So the Republicans try to implant in the imaginary that the issue in Catalonia “is not to give strength to the PSOE to stop what it has to its right, but to give ERC strength to force the PSOE to agree with what it has to its left ”.
This is how candidate Gabriel Rufián summed up yesterday the usefulness of his party in Congress. “People who want a left-wing government and think of Catalonia or the Basque Country, who vote for ERC or EH Bildu”, and no “branchism”, he said in reference to En Comú Podem and PSC, “neither frivolity, nor empty slogans; politics, politics and politics ”, he prescribed.
Yesterday, Esquerra Republicana held the central act of the campaign in front of the symbolic Born Cultural Center, converted since 2013 into an icon of the independence claim after investing 12 years of works and 84 million euros in it. The act had a large poster of nine participants, including the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès; the general secretary of the party, Marta Rovira; Ruffian himself; the national coordinator of EH Bildu, Arnaldo Otegi, and the president of the Catalan formation, Oriol Junqueras. And in all parliaments, the role that the pro-independence left must play was very present.
In the case of Otegi, to “incline the balance towards progress and national freedom against the reactionary bloc”, and in the case of the ERC leaders to attack PSOE and Sumar which, as Rovira said in a telematic connection from Geneva , “they have resigned from being part of the left” and “they have not stopped being part of the Spanish right”.
Rovira was especially belligerent with Yolanda Díaz, whom he accused of “collaborating” with the Spanish right in the face of the “wisp of hope” that in his opinion represented United We Can.
The recipe for the vote for ERC “before the Spanish left that has decided to become the right” was claimed by Rovira, but also by President Aragonès, who did not miss the opportunity to denounce the possible appeal before the Constitutional Court (TC) of the law Catalan anti-drought, approved in Parliament with PSC and common. The head of the Government accused the Catalan socialists and the commons of having “two masters” and criticized the “hypocrisy” of these parties because “between defending the interests of Catalonia or the unity of Spain, they always choose the unity of Spain.”
Junqueras also questioned the progressive nature of the PSOE and the commons, recalling that ERC has always “been there” to defeat the right, while the socialists invested in Rajoy and the commons “agreed with the right of Manuel Valls” and “again with the PP and PSOE to impose on us a mayor that the majority of voters had not voted for”.
The president of the party insisted that the only way to achieve independence is “to be more to be stronger” and his idea that the Basque Country and Catalonia one day hold “simultaneous” self-determination referendums.
In the act, no one made express mention, or by omission, of Junts, his direct rival at the polls. Rufián had already done so hours before, in statements to the ACN, to reach out to them. As the candidate pointed out, the day after 23-J the Catalan independence movement should meet to agree on how to “defend Catalonia”. For this, he asked Junts and the CUP for a “sense of the Catalan State” and opted to set an “agreed and higher price” in the event that their votes are required to invest Sánchez. And “get out of the toxicity loop” with Junts, because people “neither deserve it nor understand anything” and “does not encourage anything good,” he claimed.
