One in five Catalans would support the Constitution if a referendum were held again. This is what emerges from the Political Opinion Baròmetre of the Center d’Estudis d’Opinió (CEO) in the third wave of 2023, published last November. Support for the Magna Carta recovers slightly compared to five years ago. If a referendum were held today to ratify it, 21% of Catalans would vote ‘Yes’, compared to 17.5% in 2018.
Adherence to the 1978 Constitution, which celebrates 45 years this December 6, continues to be in the minority, although those who would vote ‘No’ to cooling it drop significantly, from 57% to 42% of those surveyed. Among those in favor of independence, 7.7% would now ratify it (in 2018 it was 7.1%), but the level of opposition has decreased, going from 73.9% to 64%.
Both barometers asked respondents what they would vote “if a referendum were held again to ratify the current Spanish Constitution.” The comparison shows that those who would vote again for the supreme rule of Spain are still well below 50% in Catalonia, but nevertheless they grow by 3.5 percentage points compared to 2018 and stand at 21% of those surveyed.
More important is the variation with respect to those who would vote ‘No’, which falls by 15 percentage points: in 2018 57% would have rejected ratifying the Constitution and by the end of 2023 they are just over 42%, always according to the CEO’s survey.
By age groups, those over 65 continue to be those who would vote the most again in favor of the current Magna Carta. Currently, up to a third of that age group would vote yes. On the other hand, only 14.1% of young people between 18-24 years old would support it, being the age group that would least vote ‘Yes’ (unlike what happened in 2018 when it was those between 25 and 34 years old who Fewer opted for this option, only 13.4%). And although explicit support for the Constitution among the youngest declines, so does their level of opposition, which has fallen below half of those surveyed in this age group, going from 53.4% ??in 2018 to 44. .8% in the last wave of the barometer.
By sex, men would vote ‘No’ more (46.9%) than women (38.1%), as was already the case in 2018 but with a wider margin. On the other hand, the ‘Yes’ votes are now equal between men and women (around 21% for both), when five years ago there was a difference of five points between them, with women being the ones who show the least support, with only 15% of those surveyed for the ‘Yes’ option.
Regarding the parties, the 2023 survey shows that only 34% of Vox voters would vote ‘Yes’ on the Spanish Constitution, and up to 32% would vote against. There is also 15% of its voters who would not vote. On the other hand, respondents from PP and Cs would again vote for it in the majority (52% and 50% respectively), with a growth of 6.5 percentage points in the case of the popular ones. In 2018, up to 25.7% of PP respondents said they would vote ‘No’ in the current Constitution and now the percentage has dropped to 15.7%.
Among the pro-independence parties, CUP voters are by far the most opposed (83%), Junts voters would vote 77% against the Magna Carta, and ERC voters would vote 61.9%. That of the Republicans is the most pronounced change among the three pro-independence parties, since five years ago ERC voters opted for ‘No’ by 80%.
Among PSC voters, adherence to the current Constitution was around 30% in 2018 and today it is 35.8%, while the percentage of those who would have voted ‘No’ in 2018 drops a lot compared to those who would do so at the end of 2023. : from 42.1% to 27.6%.
Finally, it stands out that 58.7% of En Comú Podem voters would vote ‘No’ to ratifying the Magna Carta, and the percentage has been reduced compared to 2018, when it was 65.3%. Those who would vote in favor are 18%, two points more than 5 years ago.
The CEO’s barometers have not always included questions about the Spanish Constitution, and if they did it was not always to ask for the option to vote in the event of a ratification referendum. However, in the survey ‘Els Valors Democràtics, 30 years after June 15, 1977’, published in 2007, the CEO asked Catalans whether they believed that the Constitution should be reformed or not, and also their degree of satisfaction with the text.
Regarding the first question, the result was quite balanced: 42.3% of those surveyed opted to reform the Constitution, while 38.6% favored “leaving it as it is.” When asked about the degree of satisfaction with the Constitution, up to 65.4% declared themselves ‘Quite satisfied’ and 9.2% ‘Very satisfied’. On the other hand, 13.8% responded ‘Somewhat satisfied’, and 3%, ‘Not at all satisfied’.
