This text belongs to the newsletter The Director's Bulletin, which is sent every Friday morning. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
Good morning,
This weekly newsletter serves to honor colleagues in the Politics section. From La Vanguardia and the rest of the media. The information tension to which they have been subjected for a few years is unbearable. We have never had such agglomeration of elections as a result of the atomization of the different parliaments that cause continuous electoral advances. Pere Aragonès' decision to advance the Catalans means that the section has to continue three in just three months. First, the Basques on April 21, then the votes for the Parliament on May 12 and then the European auction on June 9.
The rumor mill about the early elections began strongly last week. Last Saturday we interviewed Jéssica Albiach who already warned us about her position radically against the Hard Rock project. A week before, and forgive the self-quote, the writer of this ended his article on page two in a premonitory way: “It would be striking if hard rock was destroying budgets.” Last Sunday's Catalunya en Comú rally was already a declaration of intentions and the Minister of Culture, Ernesto Urtasun, was especially critical of the Tarragona project.
Precisely one of the debates these days has revolved around the role of Sumar and his degree of influence on the commons to make them change their minds. Aragonès and Albiach have exchanged all kinds of barbs in this regard. In view of the Government's quick reaction to renounce the approval of this year's budgets, one tends to think that the electoral call was an option that benefited everyone but for which no one wanted to take responsibility. In the end, since no one made an additional effort to force an agreement, the budgets fell and new elections were called.
Therefore, everyone is happy. Perhaps those who are less so, although they hide it, are the Junts forces who are beginning to doubt whether Carles Puigdemont should go to the European or the Catalan ones, as Lola García explains very well today. It would be the third time that he ran in the Catalan elections from Brussels. And Puigdemont does not rule out returning to Catalonia despite the risk of being arrested, as announced this morning by his lawyer Gonzalo Boye. We will see if it is a real option or just electoral marketing.
And this new appointment with the polls will allow us to count ourselves again. In the last ones, Salvador Illa won in a very close result over Pere Aragonès and Carles Puigdemont, represented by number two, Laura Borràs. After failed attempts, ERC and Junts made a government pact that led to the inauguration of the Republican candidate. The Government lasted just a year and a half because Carles Puigdemont's party abandoned him in an unusual decision. These precedents mean that the 12-M elections are expected to be very close and that it is not at all clear that they will provide a result that allows governability for any party.
They are going to once again be “transcendental” elections, as has become usual, and one of the great unknowns will be whether the independence movement will continue to achieve an absolute majority or not, regardless of which force comes first.
Elections are an uncomfortable stage for a newspaper. All parties believe they have the most lucid candidates with the best prepared programs and demand to have a good quota, both on paper and in the digital edition, and, above all, what they do not want is for their opponents to have space. Any headline, photograph or focus of a chronicle is reinterpreted to reach the conclusion that the newspaper supports one candidate more than another. As the electoral campaign has already begun - the 15 days thing is a joke - we have already psyched ourselves up about what we have to do.
The objective is to send you the best and most useful information about the campaign and I appeal, once again, to the patience of the La Vanguardia Politics team for this.
Happy Friday.
