In the final sprint of a campaign, the useful vote has as many colors as candidates, but antithetical goals. Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, installed in the victory that the latest polls advance, claims him to govern alone; and Pedro Sánchez, in search of an upheaval that refutes the prognoses. The sprint starts in Catalonia. Yesterday Sánchez tried to entrust the PSC’s celebrated victory to the rest of socialism and today Feijóo will make constitutionalism his flag in Barcelona.
The process has been the great absentee of the campaign. The socialist candidate does not demand pardons or the dialogue table, he simply clings to its effects: “In Catalonia there were messes, discord, confrontation. Today’s Catalonia is much better”. Moncloa put the Catalan folder back in the drawer last summer thinking about the municipal elections and the general rush after the local and regional fiasco has locked the drawer.
Sánchez does bluntly defend his alliance with Yolanda Díaz, against a PP-Vox government, but avoids that to overcome this alliance he will need another “majority of investiture” which would make the Catalan and Basque independence supporters decisive.
Nor is the PP campaigning at the expense of Catalonia. The popular people now prefer to “repeal Sanchism” without healing the Catalan wound that Mariano Rajoy’s government enlarged. They estimate that they will get between 6 and 8 seats in Catalonia – 2 in 2019 – and they intend to do so by lowering the tone but without concessions. “There can be no submission to independence”, they conclude. Feijóo defends himself in the State-Generalitat bilateral commission – with Rajoy (2011-2018) he never met – to justify any relationship with governmental independence and “let them call it what they want”.
In Catalonia, the confrontation between pro-independence parties and the absence of a joint road map is cooling the campaigns of ERC and Junts and their electoral expectations are conditioned by the militant abstentionism that already defeated the republicans in the municipal elections.
Junts put into play yesterday Carles Puigdemont’s telematic letter from Amer, his hometown, to mobilize lovers of the confrontation, while ERC exploits today its alliance with EH Bildu, with Arnaldo Otegi as the protagonist of the central event of the campaign. The independence dispute is numerical and substantive. Together, he won the ERC game in municipal votes – the quotas of power are decided in the offices – and now he aspires to overtake on 23-J. Then there is the strategy.
ERC wants to agree on the conditions of pro-independence support for a hypothetical investiture of Sánchez, but the exploratory negotiations did not go from there. “We will have to wait until the 24th”, they admit to ERC. The Republicans want to keep their profile talking in Madrid, but they need to erase the label of “rebates” that Junts attributes to their votes, while the post-convergents are increasingly closing the door on Sánchez. If they are needed to block the passage of PP and Vox, the former president has made it clear to Ara that “Sánchez will not be president with the votes of Junts”.
A PP-Vox government will not unite independence either. ERC wants the president of the Generalitat to be the image of the Catalan trench. While Puigdemont was acting in Amer – in the coming days Xavier Trias and Artur Mas are expected to cover all fronts – Pere Aragonès was commemorating 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 Junts to give stability to the Government, a fact that the post-convergents have no intention of compromising with their sights set on the Catalan elections. “A government with 33 deputies is not acceptable,” Puigdemont replied in the aforementioned interview.
Puigdemont’s position worries some families in Junts and revolts the PSC. “What will you block? The revaluation of pensions? The minimum wage?” asked Salvador Illa yesterday, who also complained about ERC’s mercantilist terminology when conditioning his votes for Sánchez. Catalan socialism is the main pillar for Sánchez’s survival. The paradox is that the PSC will narrowly win the elections in Catalonia, but its essential victory seems insufficient. The ten seats of difference that there may be between PSC and PP in the Catalan ballot boxes do not compensate for Núñez Feijóo’s advantage in the polls.
It is not the first time that the PSC has been the victim of bitter victories and the cava is left in the fridge because Ferraz is unable to make ends meet. Without Sánchez, “the problems would return”, warned Illa. While independence is debated between dialogue and the trenches.
