If the positions expressed by the representatives of the eight political parties that participated in the Spanish Television debate are maintained after the May 12 elections, the risk of a blockade occurring that prevents the constitution of the new Catalan government is very high. .
Salvador Illa, the PSC candidate, whom all polls place at the head of the electoral race, has assured tonight that as long as he is the winner of the votes, he will present himself for the investiture. “Now tell me,” he asked, “who is going to block it?” Not a single one of the groups competing in the debate has given an unconditional yes to the socialist leader.
Not even Jéssica Albiach, from the Comuns Sumar, the group apparently most inclined to a progressive agreement for the future Catalan government, has left the door clearly open. Their condition: that Junts be excluded from an eventual pact.
Pere Aragonès, the president and candidate of ERC, has also set conditions, the first of which, the agreement for a referendum, at this point, unaffordable for the socialist party. “What we will do when seeking support to form a government is to talk about the what.”
The representative of Junts, Josep Rull, in the absence of Carles Puigdemont, has been more categorical and has made it clear, as the former president himself did days ago, that he will not give his votes to the Catalan socialists to govern the Generalitat. “We cannot turn the page to October 1. We will not agree with the socialists. “We will not agree on Salvador Illa.”
Carlos Carrizosa has also been discounted as an eventual supporter of Illa as the presumed winner, in the same way as Alejandro Fernández. “We will not talk to anyone who wants to break the constitutional pact,” the PP candidate categorically stated, who has placed the PSC in that orbit of those who go beyond the Magna Carta.
Ignacio Garriga, from Vox; and Laia Estrada of the CUP, each with their own reasons, have made it clear that they are not up for the job either. Consequently, having heard what was said in the debate and with the data available from the surveys, the risk of a blockade is obvious.
For the rest, the debate, led by Gemma Nierga and Xabier Fortes, served to place the Amnesty law defended by Salvador Illa in the campaign. “We need to open a new stage and to achieve this we must normalize political life in Catalonia,” said the socialist leader, while the Republican candidate and also the representative of Junts, Josep Rull, claimed political fatherhood of the criminal pardon promoted by the group. socialist in Congress.
The controversy has served to show the level on which the two major pro-independence parties stand today. Far from the unilateralist strategy that characterized the performance of ERC and Junts until a few years ago, it seems that both formations now compete for who has more influence and the ability to twist the arm of the Spanish government.
As has been demonstrated in the debate, this does not mean that neither of the two parties have renounced their independence agenda, but rather that their strategy now involves persuading the central Executive to allow them to develop it. A path that Pere Aragonès made his own, congratulating himself that Junts has ended up embracing it as well.
Of course, at this point PP, Ciudadanos and Vox have flatly rejected the approval of this law, which should occur at the end of this month. For the PP candidate, this law is nothing more than a written rule “for the interests of Pedro Sánchez.” “I don’t see pacification anywhere in Catalonia,” Fernández concluded.
The first block of the debate has focused on public services and the management of the outgoing government. There has been a certain consensus among almost all the parties, with the logical exception of the still president of the Generalitat, in saying that the Catalan administration is not going well.
Another very different thing is to agree on what has happened to reach this situation. And so while Pere Aragonès attributes the deficiencies to the policy of cuts inherited from the convergent executives, Josep Rull, from Junts, attributed much of the blame to the political corset of the Government of Spain and the ineffectiveness of the last republican government.
For the rest of the parties, on the contrary, the last ten years marked by the ‘procès’ have taken Catalan politics to a sphere far removed from the management of the real problems of society. In his opinion, time, money and energy have been wasted.
As a culmination of the debate, two last notes. On the one hand, the speech of Ignacio Garriga from Vox for whom, everything or almost everything, involves holding immigrants responsible. It’s his political streak. Even in the debate on the Amnesty law, he ended up saying that the “biggest problem in Catalonia is the Islamization of society.”
And second note: Alejandro Fernández’s anger with Carlos Carrizosa that came to question his loyalty to Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s Popular Party. Fernández, an educated guy with a knack for irony, ended up stopping him angrily.
