Junts per Catalunya is like the blanket that tries to cover Laura Borràs and Xavier Trias at the same time and that falls short. Transversality is an aspiration of any party that aspires to govern and it was a defining feature of the Convergència, but now, when the president of the formation is covered, the candidate for Barcelona is uncovered, and vice versa. It would be time to take care of the candidate for mayor, who can achieve the institutional power that Junts has been losing, but the fear of a split in the party makes his number two, Jordi Turull, avoid for the moment traumatic decisions about the future of Borrà s, condemned for prevarication and documentary falsification.
Within the party, there are those who maintain that the dependence on Carles Puigdemont has left Junts anchored in 2017 and its consequences, while Catalan society has been changing registers and concerns. It is not that the independence movement has evaporated, but they intuit that the concerns are taking other paths, that the pandemic repositioned the priorities and that today the interest of the citizen swings between inflation and drought, to give two examples.
The other soul of the party maintains hope in the revulsion of the return of Puigdemont and claims to sustain the tension against the State. Although few are seriously thinking about another clash like the one in 2017, it is about keeping the flame alive and rearming against an ERC pactista, without forgetting that another rival could emerge for Junts in the form of the ANC electoral list.
That dichotomy will not be resolved even if Trias gets a good result in Barcelona, ​​as some hope. The contradictions will continue after the municipal elections if Junts has to decide, for example, whether to revalidate the pact with the PSC in the Barcelona Provincial Council.
The Socialists build bridges with Junts to help recover their participation in institutional politics, in Catalonia and, if possible, also in Madrid, to have a possible new ally. The question is to discern on which board the battle between PSC, ERC and Junts will be played, in this electoral cycle. A few years ago the competition revolved around the axis of secession, between supporters and detractors, and between independentistas. This last fight is still active, but the other has been nuanced and the management of self-government takes shape. Which of the three is best placed on that front?
The Republicans believed that, with Junts out of the Government, they would finally emerge as the Convergència of the 21st century, the main party of Catalan society, in which a majority trusts to lead the country. But with only 33 deputies, their room for maneuver is very little. ERC had to give in to the PSC to approve the budget, but the drought decree has once again put them in front of the mirror. Faced with day-to-day difficulties, Pere Aragonès recovers his pro-independence accent with the idea of ​​a Canadian-style law of clarity. The problem is that, when unilateralism has gone so far, the rest sounds like entertainment for a part of the independence movement.
Salvador Illa also tries to position the PSC as the “pal de paller” of Catalan politics. He offers to restore institutions after more than a decade of upheavals and to recover projects that have been relegated over the years, such as the B-40. Both fronts allow him to delve into the contradictions of Junts, but especially of ERC.
Trias’s candidacy is a symptom of Junts’ desire to present itself once again as the party of order that was once the CDC and that today, paradoxically, the ERC and the PSC try to embody. The raison d’être of the convergents was always to govern, while Junts has preferred the opposition. The resolution of the pulse with Borrà s will give clues about the chosen path. As the journalist Núria Orriols explains in her book Convergència. Metamorfosi or extinction, one of the successes of that formula was the accent on “doingâ€, rather than “beingâ€. Catalan society has been changing. With the procés, “being” took advantage. Capturing the extent to which citizens now demand more “doing†will be crucial.
