The battle that ERC and Junts are waging in the polls for the hegemony of the pro-independence segment is already having a vivid reflection on the microphones, even though there is still a whole month to go before the Catalan election campaign officially begins. The invectives launched at ERC by the post-convergence candidate Carles Puigdemont, in which he accused the Republicans of “giving up” and leaving “eight million people in the deadlock, supercharging Madrid”, received the answer yesterday from Pere Aragonès: “Whoever gives up is who leaves the Government in the middle of the legislature”, he criticized.
The “surrender” of which they accuse each other portrays well the category of the dispute between the two formations. Together they criticize the ERC for capitulating too cheaply following the claims of the PSOE and the central government, while the republicans sanction the “electoralist” way of acting of their rival when they “abandoned” the Government of the Generalitat in the middle of the legislature or, ultimately, proposing for the umpteenth time a single pro-independence list knowing that it is completely unworkable.
Aragonès thus replicated the words of Puigdemont in Elna, where the ex-president presented the agreement to run together in the 12-M with half a dozen minority independence formations and warned, with reference to Aragonès, that “a country not it advances if it has a Government that leaves the house tired”. For Aragonès, it is Junts who has given up by leaving the Government “when Catalonia needed everyone to show their face”, and thus puts the disagreement in the sack to approve the frustrated budgets of 2024. “We always show our face; I always show my face”, assured the president.
Accompanied by the ministers of Social Rights, Carles Campuzano, and of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, in a visit to the Barnahus de Vilanova i la Geltrú (Garraf), Aragonès revealed that the vice-president of the Catalan Executive, Laura Vilagrà, will return to be his number two on the electoral list that he heads for the 12-M, because he is a person with negotiation skills and “because he never shirks his responsibilities”, he pointed out. In Lleida, the head of the ERC list will be deputy Marta Vilalta; spokeswoman Raquel Sans will head that of Tarragona, and in Girona the number one will be Laia Cañigueral.
