On February 14, 2021, Catalonia surely experienced the strangest electoral process in its history, with permission from the previous one – called on December 21, 2017 by Mariano Rajoy under article 155 -, in the midst of the covid pandemic, among the third and the fourth wave, with time slots, mandatory masks and PPE suits for members of the polling stations between 7 and 8 p.m. to care for those people infected or living with people sick with the lethal virus.
This exceptionality caused participation to go from 79.1% in 2017 (positive record) to 51.3% (negative record), and the main beneficiaries of this circumstance were the pro-independence parties that surpassed 50% of the votes for the first time. issued and reissued the absolute majority in the Parliament. For this reason, the winner of the elections, the socialist Salvador Illa, who had replaced Miquel Iceta just two months before as a candidate for the Generalitat, saw all his options buried, as had happened four years ago to Inés Arrimadas (Cs).
The PSC won in votes (23%) and tied with Esquerra in seats (33). The Republicans, who won 21.3% of the votes, achieved for the first time the overthrow of Junts -formerly Convergència- (32) and claimed leadership among the independence movement, which allowed their candidate, Pere Aragonès, apply to be invested. The nine CUP deputies (6.7%) gave the independence movement 74 seats, six above the absolute majority. In fact, the pro-independence forces reached 51% of the vote thanks to the PDECat, nominal heir to the defunct CDC and led by former councilor Ángels Chacón, who obtained 2.72% but was left out of the Catalan Chamber.
In any case, Junts, led by Laura Borràs, made the Esquerra candidate sweat the investiture. After the constitution of the Chamber, in which the post-convergents obtained the presidency for Borràs herself thanks to the absolute pro-independence majority, Aragonès had to go through a failed investiture on March 26 and 30 due to the abstention of Junts as it was not reached a government agreement.
A few days before the deadline for new elections to be automatically called expired, ERC and Junts reached an agreement and Aragonès was inaugurated on May 21. A fragile agreement that conditioned the entire legislature and that was broken 16 months later, leaving Esquerra in a minority and forced to agree on two budgets in a row with PSC and the commons. The rejection of the commons to a third budget forced Aragonès to anticipate the elections for this May 12.
Regarding the rest of the political formations, those elections meant the collapse of Ciudadanos, with Carlos Carrizosa at the helm, which went from being the first force in the Parliament with 36 seats to seventh with only 6 (5.6% of the vote) and the continuity of the decline of Alejandro Fernández’s PP (3.95 of the vote), which was left with three deputies, of the four it held, and had to move to the mixed group. The two Spanish center-right parties were greatly diminished by the firm entry of Ignacio Garriga’s far-right Vox, which garnered 7.7% of the vote and won 11 seats.
On the left side, the commons, led by Jéssica Albiach, maintained the eight seats they already had and the CUP, with Dolors Sabater, recovered, going from 4 deputies in 2017 to 9.
