The families of the Bosc school in Rubí (Barcelona) have been waiting since 2010 for the barracks with which the center began to operate to become real buildings. Located in a municipality of 80,000 inhabitants in what was previously the industrial belt of Barcelona, the school received a promise from the Generalitat that the definitive work would begin in 2011. But 13 years later the barracks are still there. Since then, five elections have been called in Catalonia – all of them early – and up to five presidents and six councilors from three different parties have held the Education portfolio. The last promise from the Generalitat came just a year ago in the form of a new calendar: the school will be finished in 2026. But between the promise and the tender for the works, new elections have slipped in, also early and, who knows, if another change of government.
Catalonia returns to the polls today with the tribulations typical of any Western country and with the addition of constant political instability, derived from the independence process, which has filled it with pending issues such as the Bosc school. The question that citizens will answer, with their vote towards the seven or eight parties with options to obtain representation, is whether they want to right the course and return to stability. For the favorite in these elections, the socialist Salvador Illa, this would be achieved with a government under his tutelage that, through agreements with other formations, breaks the bloc scheme between independentists and non-independentists that has characterized the Catalan castling of the last 12 years. . For the sovereignists, the unlocking can only come with a solid majority of formations that pursue secession and seek to force a self-determination referendum. Nothing will be normal in Catalonia, they maintain, as long as this issue is not “resolved.”
Both of them, without any clear majority in the polls, with the risk of a total blockade in the air and with the threat of a new growth of the extreme right, reach the polls today after the Government chaired by Pere Aragonès collapsed in March after failing to approve the Budgets. One of the first questions that will be resolved tonight is whether the independentists, divided into three already established parties – ERC, Junts and the CUP – and with the unknown of whether the extreme right of Aliança Catalana will achieve representation, reach the 68 seats that give the absolute majority. Since the processes It started almost 15 years ago, the first three parties have always joined forces, which has allowed different government coalitions always with independence as their banner and without having achieved, for now, any clear progress towards it. The restlessness of the independence bases is more than evident after the traumatic implosion of the processes which in 2017 ended with half the Government imprisoned and the other half seeking refuge abroad, among them former president Carles Puigdemont who, along with Salvador Illa, will be one of the main faces of the night. The question is not only whether the independence movement will be able to gain this majority – most polls rule this out – but also who leads this bloc. ERC achieved primacy three years ago, which allowed Pere Aragonès to be invested with support from the CUP and Junts, which very soon began to falter. However, relations between the two major pro-independence parties are almost broken after Junts left the Government in October 2022.
Puigdemont and the current Catalan president, Aragonès, are fighting for this independence leadership. The first from France, where he is campaigning waiting for the amnesty that his party, along with the rest of the pro-independence and left-wing formations, have agreed with the PSOE to be definitively approved in a movement that has monopolized Spanish political life for the last nine years. months but that has only appeared glancingly in the electoral race. Despite having renounced the amnesty in the past, Puigdemont now considers it his own merit, and has taken refuge in this “achievement” to boost his political career.
The leader of Junts, unlike what he did when he governed, has not based his campaign on making predictions or concrete promises about independence. In line with the decline in support for independence, secession no longer appears as a legislative commitment in the Junts program and, in its place, a nebulous promise has appeared to “unite the independence movement” to do something that they do not specify. “We will finish what we started,” “we will do it again, but better,” Puigdemont summarized the campaign. This reduction in approaches has allowed him to regain the support of the old Convergència with a video of support from Jordi Pujol, the great patriarch of Catalan nationalism still pending trial for having hidden undeclared money in Andorra.
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ERC, which has been betting on the agreed referendum for more than five years, looks with joy on Junts for having abandoned what they call “magical independence” according to which independence would fall on its own accord based on constant mobilization. “Welcome to the negotiation,” Pere Aragonès usually says in a joking tone every time Junts embraces postulates such as the agreed referendum or the amnesty. However, in the relentless fight between pro-independence forces, Puigdemont’s push, especially during the campaign, raises fears of a real disaster in the Republican ranks, who would see that his dream of presiding over the Generalitat has only lasted one term.
On the right the battle is not calmer. A Popular Party that hit rock bottom three years ago now aspires to return to its normal levels of representation in Catalonia at the hands of Alejandro Fernández. The polls say that he will achieve it by eating the remains of Ciudadanos with a very combative speech with the processes but it also talks about problems of insecurity and immigration. The most difficult challenge there is to also grow at the expense of Vox to deactivate the extreme right. If he does not achieve this, Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s commitment to Catalonia will have remained incomplete and could lead to problems in the medium term.
On the left, the space of the commons, now without Podemos and now in coalition with Sumar, begins its umpteenth transmutation with a purely environmentalist discourse that they have wanted to single out in their campaign against the Hard Rock macrocasino that the big parties want to build in Tarragona. They will be decisive for an eventual left-wing government, but polls warn them of the risk of falling into irrelevance, something that would be a new blow for the territorial implementation of Yolanda Diaz’s new party after its double setback in Galicia and Euskadi. In their favor they have the centrist turn that Illa has given to the PSC – a formation that Jéssica Albiach usually refers to as “the party of asphalt and concrete” – and that clears their left flank.
But in Catalonia, the space of Comuns and Sumar competes with an anti-capitalist offer with a lot of territorial implementation such as the CUP, which has also opted to increase the volume of the environmentalist demand and lower the independence demand. Immersed in disputes between families, with a congressional process half-finished and with leadership to be defined, the CUP seeks to be key for an independence majority as it was three years ago.
Although the level of drama in these elections has nothing to do with that of 2017, there is once again a part of the party that will have consequences in the Congress of Deputies. A broad victory for Salvador Illa will favor the interests of Pedro Sánchez. The big question is whether an eventual loss of autonomous power will change the position of the independentists in Madrid, especially when the prospect of the amnesty has been cleared. At Moncloa they want to think that it will not be like that, since the alternative is a government of PP and Vox. But there is not much desire to link both realities in the independence headquarters either, especially in the case of ERC. In Junts, voices with weight within the party consider that everything will depend on whether or not there is a majority of the independence bloc and whether, if Illa governs, she does so with pacts that they consider “hostile” towards those of Carlos Puigdemont, as happened in Barcelona. , where Mayor Jaume Collboni was invested with votes from the common people and the PP. In any case, the Catalan unlocking will depend on the solidity of these pacts.
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