It is not that there is a cordon sanitaire that marginalizes Vox from the political agreements for the new legislature. It is the training itself that is excluded. This was made very clear yesterday, at the press conference evaluating 12-M, the candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat, Ignacio Garriga, who ruled out that his training could contribute, actively or passively, to facilitating the investiture of the socialist. Salvador Illa, winner of the elections. “We couldn’t help someone who has subscribed to the entire agenda of separatism,” he said.
Garriga celebrated Vox’s results, “the best in its history in Catalonia,” he said. There have been close to 250,000 votes, 30,000 more than in the 2021 Parliamentary elections, a moderate growth that they celebrate. Especially taking into account the tough competition that has arisen in the right-wing space, with a PP that soars to fifteen seats, and the emergence of the far-right pro-independence formation Aliança Catalana, which shares the Islamophobic discourse with Vox and some of the economic proposals, including a general tax reduction, which has achieved two deputies.
On paper, Garriga sees the party’s objectives fulfilled: to grow and maintain representation in the four provinces. The parliamentary group will once again have eleven deputies, who will not participate in any of the possible governance formulas to move the legislature forward.
Asked about the possibility of Vox abstaining from an eventual investiture of Illa, as suggested yesterday on network “in exchange for a series of measures that end the process,” Garriga refused. “He has supported pardons, amnesty, he has modified the Penal Code, he has prevented our children from being educated in Spanish,” he explained, referring to Salvador Illa.
The path ahead is to oppose. “Some will ask, what now? More work, more effort, travel more through Catalonia and, above all, continue opposing separatism and socialism,” said the Vox leader. “We are aware of the long and difficult road ahead of us. But we are not going to lower any flag, we are not going to betray any principle and we are going to continue moving forward,” he added.
Vox data registers a moderate but general increase in these elections in municipalities that are already part of its electoral map. The growth of the extreme right imitates the drip irrigation technique, which permeates the land.
In the municipal elections a year ago, it achieved representation in nine of the ten most populated cities in Catalonia, except Badalona, ??and now it has grown in votes in those same municipalities compared to 2021, with the exception of Barcelona capital, where they have lost 3,000 votes. , but with a PP that has earned 57,000.
Vox has gained weight in socialist fiefdoms such as L’Hospitalet or Santa Coloma de Gramenet, with 10% of the vote, but also in Badalona (9%), Terrassa (11.9%), Sabadell (8.8%) , Mataró (11.15%), Reus (12.5%), Tarragona (11.5%), in Lleida (9.5%) and in Girona (6.27%), this last result slightly below that of Aliança Catalana (6.34).
Asked about the defeat of the PP, which has taken away their position as the hegemonic party of the right in Catalonia, Garriga pointed out that Vox “is not in that fight of who is up or down.” “These elections should serve to make a general reflection on the fact that there is the PP and there is Vox, there are no communicating vessels, we are different parties,” he assured, adding that Vox renounces “the clichés of old politics” and It addresses “the eight million Catalans”, since its alternative “goes far beyond the right, the left or the centres”.
