Personalism is a necessary venial sin in electoral campaigns. The strategies of the parties democratize guilt by exploiting the image of the 12-M headliners, with the exception of Ciutadans, which prefers to display Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont under an imperative slogan. Since they have to disappear, don’t let the candidate’s face be the last thing you remember. However, ERC and the PSC have turned the venial into a capital sin for candidate Puigdemont. “He only talks about him”, says Pere Aragonès. “I haven’t spoken to him, I’m not one of messianic leaders,” Salvador Illa said in an interview. The PSC candidate and the Junts candidate don’t even know each other.
At the time of the tripartite, the captains of the PSC boasted that their brand accounted for 70% of the vote, which reduced the weight of the candidate in the result. It was the moment when Pasqual Maragall was replaced by José Montilla, or the forging of Artur Mas from the opposition. The rooting of the acronyms among the electorate was a superior good to preserve until the cases of corruption, the new policy and the process caused the Catalan oasis to implode. Far from personalism, the Basque Country will vote for candidates who do not exceed 55% knowledge in the polls. 72% of voters give priority to the party.
Personalism is what keeps the socialists in Moncloa. Pedro Sánchez has modeled the PSOE in his image and likeness and set himself up as “the candidate” without paying attention to the idiosyncrasies of the periphery. The defeat in the municipal and Galician councils imposed a new plan on Ferraz: rearm the territorial structure and consolidate leaderships struggling with the opposition. An Island project for each community. The leader of the PSC is Sánchez’s last weapon before the European elections turned into the umpteenth PSOE-PP plebiscite.
Illa has presented his quiet “transformation” for Catalonia: an audit of the Generalitat – the one commissioned by Maragall in 2003 revealed almost 3,000 million of expenditure contracted by CiU in health -, transfers of powers and a financing system in accordance with the Statute and which no Spanish Government has executed. Illa says he has “learned” the last three years. That is why he shields his electoral advantage with discretion. Aragonès calls him the “delegate of Moncloa” and Puigdemont despises him as a “franchise” of the PSOE. “Affirmations that fall by themselves”, conclude their team.
Puigdemont did not plan to stand in the Catalan elections, but the urgency has turned the Junts list into Puigdemont x Catalonia. The candidate is comfortable in the spotlight and does not succumb to contradictions – he passed his driver’s license in Brussels by making a U-turn in the middle of the street. It has gone from the horizontal structure of the Junts of 2017, to the more convergent Junts; from screens, to presence – “disconnect the screen”, says its new website -; from “one can rule a thousand kilometers away”, to the fact that the mountain goes to Muhammad. Together they have imagined a campaign with a daily procession of buses bound for Algiers.
The figure of Puigdemont is an effective claim. It polarizes between pro-independence and every challenge to the socialists – “I have negotiated with the PSOE in Switzerland and in Brussels” – shakes up the right. Junts’ government project is yet to be discovered, while Pere Aragonès is trying to anticipate it with a constant battery of proposals: funding, airport, referendum, debates “wherever”… The president is the one who has kept alive the contact of his party with Puigdemont until a couple of months ago, as opposed to the incommunicado with Oriol Junqueras and Marta Rovira.
In Junts he is now compared to “a boxer throwing punches in the air”. Aragonès puts institutionality to the test and asserts itself in all formats: Before Risto Mejide, with Marc Giró or in El intermedi o. In the Tribuna Barcelona forum, he conjugated like never before in the first person singular: “the Government that I have presided over”, “my proposal”, “my trajectory…”. According to Woody Allen, “80% of success is simply based on insistence”. And whoever wins among the pro-independence parties will determine the meaning of the next Catalan Government and the degree of personalism of the presidency.
