Who would have thought a few years ago that, at the threshold of an electoral campaign in Catalonia like the one that begins next morning, a big fight would be taking place elsewhere. The Madrid arena is fuming, while in Catalonia the mood of the candidates exudes calm, perhaps due to the lessons learned or perhaps due to exhaustion of the available fuel.
This emotional asymmetry does not diminish the interest of the Catalan elections that will be decisive for Spain, unless everything collapses when next Monday the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, resolves the doubts that he left raised in writing yesterday in his unexpected letter.
Everything would be on a different level if the outcome were resignation, the consequences of which, calendar in hand, could even coincide with the approval of the Amnesty law. It is not a discarded scenario that everything breaks. But we will have to wait.
In the meantime, the first Basque dish last weekend – where the alliance of Sánchez's investiture was reinforced – now gives way to the Catalan tall where the conciliation policy deployed from the Moncloa will be put to the test. The socialists, in any case, need to revalidate and expand the victory of 2021 in Catalonia to give meaning to everything they have done in these years.
The bishop of this move is Salvador Illa, the PSC candidate, who yesterday morning presented his electoral program and in the afternoon returned to defend in the Senate his management at the head of the Ministry of Health in an unfriendly commission on the Koldo case. In this campaign Illa must cross the Catalan political board diagonally without breaking anything that is irreparable.
President Sánchez's letter yesterday includes, beyond his reflections on his personal future, a precise cartography of where the front line is located, thinking, perhaps, of the Catalan May 12: on one side is PP and Vox, on the other another the rest of the political forces that have provided him with often precarious support, but enough for the conservative option not to win.
And there, Junts and Esquerra play a determining role. For this reason, the Catalan elections are a key piece for the support of the Spanish legislature, because they can ratify and fortify a wavering front. As long as it doesn't collapse first.
Having lost the driving force that took the independence movement to the stratosphere, Junts and Esquerra should reach the tiebreaker of their very long competition on the night of May 12.
Puigdemont, with one foot on the border waiting for the amnesty to be definitively approved by Congress at the end of May and for him to be able to cross the border, has already started his coach campaign. All events – each day dedicated to a Catalan territory – will be held in Catalunya del Nord with the exception of the campaign closing, which will take place in Barcelona. The gesture is not minor. Gather all the militancy in your environment. Come to me. Nothing and no one is going to dispute his leadership.
Esquerra, in turn, tries to lift spirits in a difficult time. With Junqueras in the rearguard, Pere Aragonés left yesterday for Northern Ireland while sending Minister Serret to Montreal. The purpose is to try to demonstrate that in other places, what they propose – the agreed referendum – is perfectly viable, so it should also be viable in Spain.
In the strictly domestic matter, yesterday it emerged that the Government updated its legal agreement for the construction of the Tarragona casino just in the midst of negotiating the budgets for the scandal of the common left. Its leader, Jéssica Albiach, has decided to make the most of the match point that ended this legislature by destroying the budgets.
And at the other end of the rope, Alejandro Fernández's PP continues to abandon its plan for Catalonia in the conviction that it can once again be a relevant force in the Parliament, asserting its status as capital on the other side of the political shore in Catalonia.
But, of course, all these calculations are made on a scenario that suddenly changed yesterday afternoon. Either the fronts collapse or they are reinforced. There's no more.
