In the final sprint of a campaign, the useful vote has as many colors as candidates but antithetical objectives. Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, installed in the victory anticipated by the latest polls, claims him to govern alone; and Pedro Sánchez, in search of a revulsive that refutes the forecasts. The sprint starts in Catalonia. Yesterday Sánchez tried to spread the celebrated victory of the PSC to the rest of socialism; and today, Feijóo will make constitutionalism his flag in Barcelona.
The process has been the great absentee from the campaign. The socialist candidate does not claim pardons or the dialogue table, he simply clings to their effects: “In Catalonia there was trouble, discord, confrontation. The Catalonia of today is much better”. La Moncloa returned the Catalan folder to the drawer last summer thinking about the municipal elections and the precipitation of the general elections after the local and regional fiasco has locked the drawer.
Sánchez does unambiguously defend his alliance with Yolanda Díaz, against a PP-Vox government, but avoids that to overcome that alliance he will need another “investment majority” that would make the Catalan and Basque independentistas decisive.
Nor is the PP campaigning at the expense of Catalonia. The popular ones now prefer to “repeal sanchismo” without delving into the Catalan wound that the government of Mariano Rajoy enlarged. They estimate that he will obtain between 6 and 8 seats in Catalonia –2 in 2019– and he intends to do so by lowering his tone but without concessions. “There can be no submission to the independence movement,” they settle. Feijóo hides behind the State-Generalitat bilateral commission – with Rajoy (2011-2018) he never met – to justify any relationship with the government independence movement and “let them call him whatever they want”.
In Catalonia, the confrontation between the pro-independence parties and the absence of a joint roadmap cool the ERC and Junts campaigns and their electoral expectations are conditioned by the militant abstentionism that has already hit the Republicans in the municipal elections.
Junts put into play yesterday the telematic letter of Carles Puigdemont from Amer, his hometown, to mobilize the lovers of the confrontation, while ERC today exploits its alliance with EH Bildu with Arnaldo Otegi as the protagonist of the central act of the campaign. The independence dispute is numerical and fundamental. Junts won the game against ERC in votes in the municipal elections – power quotas are resolved in the offices – and now he aspires to the sorpasso. Then there are the strategies.
ERC wants to agree on the conditions of the independence support for a hypothetical investiture by Sánchez but the exploratory negotiations did not go beyond that. “We will have to wait until the 24th”, they admit in ERC. The Republicans want to maintain their dialogue profile in Madrid but they need to erase the label of “rebates” that Junts attributes to their votes, while the post-convergents are closing the door on Sánchez more and more every day. If they are necessary to bar the passage of PP and Vox, the former president has made it clear in the Ara that “Sánchez will not be president with the votes of Junts.”
A PP-Vox government will not unite the independence movement either. ERC wants the president of the Generalitat to be the image of the Catalan trench. While Puigdemont was performing in Amer – Xavier Trias and Artur Mas are expected to cover all fronts in the coming days – Pere Aragonès commemorated the 85th anniversary of the Battle of the Ebro, the longest and bloodiest of the Civil War. Historical memory as an “antidote” against the extreme right. ERC will demand that Junts give stability to the Government, something that the post-convergents have no intention of compromising with an eye on the Catalan elections. “A government with 33 deputies is not acceptable,” Puigdemont stressed in the aforementioned interview.
Puigdemont’s position worries some families in Junts and angers the PSC. “What are you going to block? The revaluation of pensions? The minimum wage? ”, Salvador Illa asked yesterday, also complaining about the mercantilist terminology of ERC when conditioning his votes to Sánchez. Catalan socialism is the main prop for Sánchez’s survival. The paradox is that the PSC will easily win the elections in Catalonia but its essential victory seems insufficient. The ten seats of difference that there may be between the PSC and PP in the Catalan polls do not compensate for the advantage of Núñez Feijóo in the polls.
It is not the first time that the PSC is the victim of bitter victories and the cava remains in the fridge because in Ferraz the accounts do not come out. Without Sánchez, “the mess would return,” warned Illa. While the independence movement is torn between dialogue and the trenches.
