Of the slightly more than 351,000 votes lost by Catalan independence as a whole in last Sunday’s municipal elections, 302,000 were lost by ERC, the party that currently governs the Generalitat, the one that has had the most prominence as a partner in Pedro’s Executive Sánchez, who insists on the negotiated way to hold a referendum on self-determination, and who managed to be the first force in votes and councilors in the local elections of 2019, when he also won in Barcelona, ​​an unprecedented fact since the transition The Republicans have been conquering an apparent political centrality after October 2017 and now they are receiving a serious warning.
At the ERC management, the debate is intense and, moreover, it is taking place under the pressure of the call for general meetings on July 23. Why are there so many people who have stopped voting for Oriol Junqueras’ party this time? This is the cursed question for ERC, a question that requires more time and peace of mind than those concerned have.
Automatically, the first reaction is to doubt the strategy followed after the collapse of the process. Something that has plagued ERC since it tried to become a big party – like the PSC or Convergència – is the excessive insecurity of its leaders when they make important decisions. It is a legacy of the years when it was a small party. In addition, the sensitivity of the ERC environment to certain criticisms of the CUP, the commons, or Junts, more recently, is notable.
If the abstention of so many republican voters obeyed an explicit rejection of the strategy of the Junqueras-Aragonès tandem, it would be logical that Junts and the CUP would have grown, but this has not been the case. The initials of Borràs and Turull lose a little more than 6,000 ballots and the anti-capitalists lose a little more than 40,000 votes.
What are the ERC voters who have stayed at home saying? The gesture must be deciphered. President Aragonès has opted for a quick response, which is inspired by an axiomatic fact: noise and constant fights demotivate. For this reason, he suggests a new framework for more cooperation between pro-independence forces, in the face of agonizing elections.
Without denying that the demobilization of many ERC voters may be due to the division and recriminations within the pro-independence bloc (something that does not affect Puigdemont’s supporters), I suspect that this is too reminiscent of the joke of the one who seeks lost keys where the street lamp shines. Beyond the local casuistry, it is necessary to rehearse answers in a field of subtleties, where the disappointment that the process has generated dwells.
In this context, why is the abstention attacking ERC now and not in the last autonomous regions? For what experts call a loss of focus: after voting to achieve express independence, after voting to demonstrate to Rajoy and the State that the cause was still very much alive, and after voting to maintain a pro-independence Government, these 300,000 they found no motivation to take the ERC ballot again. When the citizen does not know exactly what his vote is for, he stops voting.
Neither the dialogue table, nor the proposal for clarity, nor the Generalitat’s policies, nor the parliamentary influence in Madrid have been encouraging. Nor the pardons. Are we dealing with a specific event or will this be repeated in the generals? ERC’s own identity is at stake.
Beneath the cursed question, another much more difficult one beats: What can a party whose historical objective today is located in an indeterminate tomorrow offer to excite its electorate?
