Personalism is a necessary venial sin in electoral campaigns. The parties' strategies democratize guilt by exploiting the image of the headliners of 12-M, with the exception of Ciudadanos, which prefers to display Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont under an imperative slogan. Since they are going to disappear, let the candidate's face not be the last thing that is remembered. Even so, ERC and PSC have turned the venial into a capital sin for the candidate Puigdemont. “He only talks about him,” says Pere Aragones. “I have not spoken with him, I am not one of messianic leaders,” Salvador Illa concluded in an interview. The PSC candidate and the Junts candidate do not even know each other.
In the times of the tripartite system, the captains of the PSC boasted that their brand accounted for 70% of the vote, which reduced the weight of the candidate in the result. It was the moment of the replacement of Pasqual Maragall by José Montilla, or the forging of Artur Mas from the opposition. The roots of the acronym among the electorate was a superior asset to preserve until cases of corruption, the new politics and the process imploded the Catalan oasis. Far from personalism, in Euskadi they will vote for candidates who do not exceed 55% knowledge in the surveys. 72% of voters give priority to the party.
Personalism is what keeps the socialists in Moncloa. Pedro Sánchez has molded the PSOE in his image and likeness and established himself as “the candidate” without paying attention to the idiosyncrasies of the periphery. The debacle in the municipal and Galician elections imposed a new plan on Ferraz: rearm the territorial structure and consolidate leaderships fought in the opposition. An Illa project for each community. The leader of the PSC is Sánchez's last weapon before the European elections converted into the umpteenth PSOE-PP plebiscite.
Illa has presented his calm “transformation” for Catalonia: an audit of the Generalitat – the one commissioned by Maragall in 2003 brought to light almost 3,000 million of expenses incurred by CiU in health –, transfers of powers and a financing system in line with the Statute and that no government has executed. Illa says he has “learned” in the last three years. That is why he shields his electoral advantage with discretion. Aragonès calls him a “Moncloa delegate”, and Puigdemont disparages him as a “franchise” of the PSOE. “Statements that fall by themselves,” they settle on his team.
Puigdemont had not planned to attend the Catalan elections, but urgency has converted the Junts list into Puigdemont x Catalunya. The candidate is comfortable under the spotlight and does not succumb to his contradictions – he approved his driving license in Brussels by making a turn in the middle of the street… –. He has gone from the horizontal structure of the Junts of 2017 to the more convergent Junts; from screens, to presence –“disconnect the screen”, says its new website–; from “you can govern from a thousand kilometers away”, to the mountain going to Muhammad. Junts has imagined a campaign with a daily procession of buses bound for Argelers.
The figure of Puigdemont is an effective claim. He polarizes between independentists and every challenge to the socialists – “I have negotiated with the PSOE in Switzerland and in Brussels” – agitates the right. The Junts government project remains to be discovered while Pere Aragonès tries to anticipate it with a constant battery of proposals: financing, airport, referendum, debates “wherever”… The president is the one who has kept his party's contact with Puigdemont alive until a few years ago. couple of months facing solitary confinement with Oriol Junqueras and Marta Rovira.
At Junts they now compare him to “a boxer throwing punches into the air.” Aragonès tests the institutionality and vindicates himself in all formats: Ante Risto Mejide, with Marc Giró or in El intermedia. In the Tribuna Barcelona forum he combined the first person singular like never before: “The Government that I have presided over”, “my proposal”, “my career…”. According to Woody Allen, “80% of success is simply based on persisting.” And whoever wins among the independentists will mark the meaning of the next Government and the degree of personalism of the presidency.
