Pere Aragonès kept the song. “Agreeing with the PP is not our priority,” said Salvador Illa during Friday’s debate organized by La Vanguardia and RAC1. The president of the Generalitat immediately noted that not giving priority does not mean completely discarding the pact. So the ERC candidate, who is also an ERC candidate, raised the specter of a PSC-PP pact on Saturday at a campaign event in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. What happened in Barcelona City Council works as an example, when the socialist Jaume Collboni took over the mayor’s office after the last minute support of the Popular Party. The victim on that occasion, however, was Xavier Trias, from Junts.
“[Illa] said, like Jaume Collboni a year ago, that he would not accept the votes of the PP to be president… you will know them by his actions,” Aragonès criticized. “If they can, they will do the same as in Barcelona twice,” he pointed out. remembering this time the pact in 2019, when Ernest Maragall, despite winning the municipal elections, was left out of the game after Colau and Collboni obtained the support of Manuel Valls. For the ERC candidate, a Government in which his party is not present is condemned to repeat the cuts.
Precisely in today’s event, ERC has highlighted its social policies and those aimed at reversing the cuts that marked the mandates of Artur Mas. Anna Simó, Minister of Education, has been the one who has boasted the most about the activity of her Government: “If Junts returns, the cuts will return.” But those of Oriol Junquetas do not distinguish socialists from post-convergents at this point. They see both as capable of drastically reducing spending on public services again. For different reasons: to Illa, because “she bows before the Moncloa”; to Puigdemont, because, in his opinion, they had the opportunity to reverse the cuts when they were in the Government, but they abandoned it.
Aragonès has fired a bullet when he has highlighted the poor execution compared to those budgeted by the State for Catalonia. He has directly blamed the PSC: “We have wasted time, since they have had ministers for six years.”
Junqueras has insisted on the same meaning. “With Aragonès we have records of exports, foreign investment, and employment records,” highlighted the leader of ERC. But even so there are shortcomings, he has admitted. He has attributed them to the central government, the scarcity of resources, he has said, that he allocates to Catalonia. “They systematically deny them to us.” For this reason, Junqueras has demanded a massive vote for his party.
Be that as it may, the uncertainty about the future of Pedro Sánchez leads ERC to better assure that Illa is “the delegate of Moncloa” than of the president. Despite the fact that Pere Aragonès assures in public that he is opting to win the May 12 elections, the party is aware that the PSC has enough margin to be the most voted force. So the aspiration of the Republicans is to wear down the socialists to get the maximum number of votes.
The example is the second most populated city in Catalonia, l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, where over the last decade Esquerra, from being practically residual, has been making a place for itself until it is the second group with the most support in the last two municipal elections. Of course, there is a great distance with the PSC. The Republicans do not save this.
