Despite tripling the number of seats compared to 2019 and achieving the goal of surpassing ERC and Junts votes, the Catalan PP was a victim of its own expectations and its six deputies (five in Barcelona and one in Tarragona) were far behind to be able to contribute to the wide victory in all of Spain that Alberto Núñez Feijóo needed to reach Moncloa.
In Catalonia, where the PSC obtained 19 representatives in Congress, to which are added the seven from the commons, there was the key to these completely insufficient results for the conservative leader, which is why they are now being analyzed with scrutinizes possible strategy errors and looks for the reasons for this lack of connection with the electorate.
The executive of the Catalan PP assumes that some issues, without giving more details, were not resolved “adequately”. It was a “pity”, they say, that in Girona, for example, they were less than 300 votes away from getting a deputy, while in Lleida the fight with the ultra-right made this possibility even further away. The “bad coordination” between the PP and Vox to add seats in the provinces where they danced for the application of the D’Hondt method took its toll, according to the party.
But beyond factors that affected the entire campaign of the generals, such as the pacts in town councils and autonomous communities with the formation of Santiago Abascal, which mobilized against left-wing voters, there are intrinsic aspects of Catalan politics that some voices point out as determinants.
This is the case of the historical founder of the party, Manuel Milián Mestre, who from the independent vantage point granted to him by his recent 80 years is very critical of the decisions that the leadership of the PP takes in relation to Catalonia since the times of José María Aznar, whom he places at the origin of a “centralist” drift that has caused a “profound distortion” of the Catalan reality seen from Madrid.
Until full autonomy is granted to the PP of Catalonia and the “scandalous colonization” that Génova undertook then and continued with Mariano Rajoy and Pablo Casado, without Feijóo having turned the situation around for the time being, ends, there will be no solution, insists Milián, who denounces the attempts to remove Alejandro Fernández just at a time when the formation was widening its path after the derailment of Ciutadans.
With the regional congress, in which the ideological approaches and the leadership will be defined, once again postponed sine die, until the horizon is clear and it is known whether or not there is an electoral repeat, the popular Catalans are this August in standby mode, according to a source in the management, although the taking of positions from below continues, as was seen in the precarious balance of the lists of July 23, between the various families of the party.
“By now Feijóo has finally understood that without Catalonia he will never govern Spain, and he literally wants a total change of faces in the Catalan PP”, says a source who knows well what is being said at the national headquarters in Madrid and in that of Barcelona.
If, finally, in the autumn, or later, the leadership of the party takes place in Catalonia, there are sectors that are betting on a profile that acts as a link with Catalanism, such as that of Enric Millo, who went through the UDC and was a CiU deputy in Parliament before leading the PP to its best results in Girona. All in all, after his time as a delegate of the Government in Catalonia during the turbulent years of the process, it will not be easy for Feijóo to convince him to leave Seville, where he works as Secretary of External Action of the Junta d’Andalusia, because try to be a prophet in his land.
“You can be a Galicianist and of the PP, you can be an Andalusianist and of the PP, you can even be a Valencianist or Basque and of the PP, why can’t you be a Catalanist and of the PP?”, asks an important position in the party .
Even so, not everyone in the Catalan PP believes that the formula for continuing to grow consists of recovering dialogue with moderate nationalism, and in this sense, they regret the “lost opportunity” to propitiate Xavier Trias to get the mayorship of Barcelona. “There is an issue that should not be ignored”, they say, and it is true that Catalonia “penalizes” the PP for its confrontation with independence, but it is also true that without the “harsh criticism” of the pacts of Pedro Sánchez with ERC and EH Bildu or the pardons, “the dispute would be more tied in the rest of Spain”. The PSOE on the one hand and Vox on the other would eat up his ground.