The recently confirmed leader of the Popular Party of Catalonia, Alejandro Fernández, is moving away at full speed from any hint of rapprochement with the complex Catalan political puzzle in which the independence movement, like it or not, continues to have consistent strength. To the point of denying that the PSC is a party aligned with the Constitution – in its terms, a constitutionalist party – due to its “flirting with the independentistas.”
Fernández, who yesterday toured two Spanish radio stations, maintained that Salvador Illa cannot be included within the “constitutionalist bloc” due to his alliances with the independence movement, which he placed “outside the margins of the Constitution” and the spirit of the transition, and warned that if the socialists want to reach a post-electoral pact with the popular ones after the parliamentary elections on May 12, they must “break any alliance with the separatists”, both in Congress and in councils and city councils.
None of the multiple surveys published in recent weeks, including the one by Ipsos for La Vanguardia, offer a result that makes a PSC government possible – which is the winner in all of them – without the help of one of the two main pro-independence forces. Junts or ERC. The expectations of the PP, despite being very good for the vote on May 12, do not reach a result that would make it a sufficient partner to form the future government of the Generalitat without counting on the independentistas.
“We are never going to play that PSC game in that kind of manipulation with separatism. No way. Turning the page happens because separatism goes to the opposition here (in the Parliament), pacts are broken in Congress and also in councils and city councils,” Fernández assured in statements to Cope.
He was also convinced that if the PSC candidate for the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, has the possibility of choosing after the next regional elections "he would prefer a thousand times to agree with the separatists than with the PP." Therefore, as he explained, the PP is the option to end the process, to which it is committed if it has “the key to Catalan politics.”
Fernández accused the PSC of having an “obsession” with power and nothing else, and “if for that they have to be cryptonationalist, Spanishist or half-pensionist, that is what they will be.”
The president of the PPC identified “classical Catalanism” – that represented at the time by the defunct Convergència i Unió – as one of the first “victims” of the sovereignty process and showed his respect for the Ciudadanos leaders, although he regretted that they had committed a new “mistake” by not wanting to attend the 12-M elections alongside the popular ones.
Interviewed later on Antena 3, the popular candidate in Catalonia also referred to the words of the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who in an interview in the newspaper El Mundo published yesterday opened the door to conversations with Junts if this party " "It is reconciled with the law, the Constitution and the Statute." Fernández assured that he does not see “any inconsistency” between what Feijóo points out and what he defends, since the conditions listed “do not exist today” nor does he believe that they will occur in the future.
After the general elections of June 23 of last year, Fernández's voice became one of the discordant notes with the strategy set by Feijóo, as the Catalan leader rejected any approach to the independence movement.
