ERC is still digesting the loss of 300,000 votes in the last municipal elections. From these results, Republicans draw two conclusions. The first is that they have not been able to capitalize on the government’s management, and the second is related to the more pragmatic profile and distance from independence that has led them to reach agreements with the PSOE in Madrid, a strategy that they consider has not worked for them. and has distanced them from the voters.

This is the reading that has been made from the leadership of the party and, therefore, the first reaction of the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, was to bet on reunifying the independence movement and safeguarding the nationalist project in the Catalan institutions.

He said it two days after the municipal elections, but this attempt to unite the pro-independence forces, far from the unitary list that Junts demanded of him, seems sterile weeks later when verifying the multiple alliances that have arisen in many town halls between socialists and post-convergents.

An insufficient movement that has forced Aragonès to give a new swerve and undertake changes in the Government. No more experiments or the signing of figures linked to other left-wing political forces, to subtract votes from the PSC and commons, as happened with the appointments after Junts left the Government.

The bet is clear in the search for organic profiles with experience in management and that provide a “revulsive” that allows the Republicans to hold out another two more years in the Generalitat and recover the ground lost in the last municipal elections. This is the will, despite the difficulties of a Government with a meager representation in Parliament, as the opposition usually reminds him, and which has to agree on new budgets ahead.

The Republicans seek to rearm for 23-J and recover the old guard of ERC before the eventual government of PP and Vox that may arise after 23-J. The decision to incorporate Teresa Jordà and replace Carolina Telechea, with a past linked to the Socialists, for the Madrid lists is framed within this strategy. Jordà is very knowledgeable about Madrid politics due to her past in Congress and in the face of a change of color in Moncloa she can be a battering ram to defend the maximalist positions of the Republicans in the Spanish capital.

In order not to give room for misinterpretations of Jordà‘s march, at a time of extreme climate urgency and with a pressing drought, Aragonès places his number two, David Mascort, at the head of the Ministry of Climate Action. A man of the party, since he was president of ERC in Girona and mayor of Vilablareix, where he achieved absolute majorities, and with experience in management.

The decision to give Ester Capella the Ministry of Territories is also part of this strategy. A voice that has more and more weight in the party and that equally serves to lead the Ministry of Justice, to be a Government delegate in Madrid or as a councilor for the Barcelona City Council with the possibility of replacing Ernest Maragall. Capella will be the one who must come to an understanding with the future Spanish government on issues such as the historic infrastructure deficit in Catalonia.

The same is the case with Anna Simó, with an extensive career in management, who has the complicity of Aragonès to appease the Education department that for two years has incited the educational community, the unions and the opposition.

They leave the Government, as well as ministers whose work had been questioned, such as that of Josep González-Cambray, at the head of Education, who has been tried to fail on two occasions, and who led teachers to demonstrate for their decisions at the head of the department . Juli Fernández has also had to deal from Territori with the B-40 project, an infrastructure in which ERC does not believe but had to assume as its own the agreement reached with the PSC to carry out the budgets.

Fernàndez had positioned himself against this highway since he was mayor of Sabadell. What’s more, when the ex-minister Jordi Puigneró was about to reach an agreement with the socialist minister Raquel Sánchez, Fernández avoided the pact on infrastructure. However, the loss of councilors in the city of Valles in the last municipal elections have been quite a warning and finally the remodeling has taken its toll.