All against Salvador Illa. The surprise electoral call in Catalonia, by the work and will of the president of the Generalitat, the Republican Pere Aragonès, and without evidence of the collusion between ERC and PSC that Junts per Catalunya denounces, will place the socialist candidate as a stark target of the independentists. The former Minister of Health, acclaimed by his people this weekend at the congress of his party as leader and candidate for the presidency, will be the probable winner of the elections, but his challenge this time is to govern. With whom or who is it? Nothing is written. The fire unleashed against the socialist party—and it will not be an open fire—will not predetermine the government alliances that may occur after the May 12 elections. Options that have been impossible for years will no longer be impossible in 2024.
It is not paripé, it is not a theater, there are no hidden pacts… These assessments come from interlocutors of socialism and the Catalan independence movement. The campaign will be tough, with deep political depth, although we cannot expect the rude, impolite and foreign tone of the minimum rules of civility that is registered in national politics. The confusion caused by Aragonès’s lightning-fast decision to call elections after seeing his budget defeated had immediate continuity in Junts’ categorical assertion that it was an arrangement between republicans and socialists. They both deny it. It cannot be ignored, however, that for the PSC, and also for the PSOE, this call opens up prospects for improvement, for the former, and for a certain recovery, for the latter, with a view to the European elections on June 9.
With or without prior agreement, the PSC and ERC are united by their interest in cornering Junts, nationalist interlocutors point out. In the extremely complicated Catalan political puzzle, it remains to be determined how much the bond that unites the independentists against the socialists weighs, despite the terrible relationship between them. From the first hour after the electoral announcement, Aragonès has attacked the leader of the PSC; as does Jordi Turull, general secretary of Junts, for whom Illa is nothing more than “a delegate of the Government of Spain” in Catalonia.
The primacy in ranking The PSC election seems assured, but the Republicans and the neo-convergents aspire to repeat the situation of 2021: The PSC won then, but could not form a government. Despite the embrace of the spokespersons in Congress of the two pro-independence parties after the approval, last Thursday, of the amnesty law, both are full-fledged adversaries; as much as they are, together and separately, of the PSC. The objective of the socialists is to grow to the point of preventing the two parties with a pro-independence seal from adding a majority that would prevent them from taking over the Government again. The novelty, only evoked as a hypothesis, would be that Illa achieved the presidency of the Generalitat with the support of one of the two independence adversaries.
The Catalunya en Comú contest, under the leadership of Jéssica Albiach, seems natural, although relations between the commons and the socialists are not going through their best moment. The latter have been the trigger, or the excuse, according to some voices, for the electoral call by not agreeing to approve the Catalan budgets. The whispered reproaches against the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, on the socialist side for not having the capacity to order the common people to support the Catalan budgets lack a solid basis. That is not the relationship of the different groups that make up that movement with the central core of Sumar, where the autonomy of the parties prevails. And much more in the case of the Catalan organization. In Madrid, Sumar is upset at the Government’s withdrawal from the State Budget for 2024.
Everyone is going to be everyone’s adversary in the 12-M elections, in which the amnesty will be the central core of the PP’s strategy, which starts from very low, with expectations of rising considerably at the expense of Vox and the hope of attracting to Ciudadanos voters who went with Illa in 2021. The socialist candidate is very aware: “I address everyone, think what you think and speak the language you speak,” he said in an appeal to all voters whom he wants to attract with day-to-day policies in the face of the material and social decline of the community.
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