“Let's make sacks of the flags and fill them with content; Let's talk about what we share: precariousness, misery, unemployment, feminist struggle and the environment”. In April, the Esquerra campaign had all the signs that it would focus on the metropolitan area, in search of the socialist vote. In order to collect the maximum number of votes in a territory mostly foreign to the independence movement, Gabriel Rufián expressed himself with these words in the presentation of him as a candidate that he made at the Institut Puig Castellar in Santa Coloma de Gramenet. Today, this speech clashes with that of Oriol Junqueras. He hasn't made a sack of flags, you don't see flags at his rallies either, but he wraps himself in them. "Any vote for independence that does not go to ERC in the metropolitan area is a wasted vote," was the high point of Junqueras.
Contrary to his boss, in that same act in Santa Coloma, Rufián got rid of the estelada and affirmed that "the only ideology and flag will be that of the City Council." He rejected the flags because "they do not feed." Junqueras was pulling the thread and limited himself to pointing out that the red belt is not called that by the socialists, but by the PSUC. “We are the real reds!” Junqueras yelled.
But one of the maxims that Rufián kept in mind in previous electoral events, “if you want to win over the convergents, don't talk about the convergents”, has gone down in history. In Esquerra they see the border of the Catalan vote with the PSC close. After the success of 2019, there is a margin, but almost all the fish is sold.
The solution has been to compete for the independence vote. The border in this case seems much more permeable and part of the electorate more interchangeable with a Junts that with Xavier Trias is risking everything in a convergent manner. ERC had managed to penetrate the space that the CDC had left orphaned. Now, with the supposed return of Junts to Convergència, the Republicans see another hole. And room for irony: yesterday, Pere Aragonès in the act in Sant Cugat del Vallès, where they govern after 32 years of the City Council being in the hands of CiU and Junts, encouraged voters to go to the polls against those who believe that "They had a stroke of bad luck, they went under a ladder or a black cat crossed their paths."
Junqueras resorts to "the disaster" of Rodalies' management, but raises his tone at rallies when he talks about Junts. He has managed to drag even the candidate for mayor of ERC for Santa Coloma, who on Saturday, in the central act, in Cornellà de Llobregat, asked the pro-independence voter to opt for the Republicans because they are "more pro-independence than anyone," although He also demanded the vote of the PSC voter, because "ERC is more socialist than anyone else."
In the manner of Rufián, Junqueras expressed in Vilafranca del Penedès: "How many people had to leave the Socialist Party to be able to continue being truly socialists." In Esquerra, of course. The last one, the Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, who yesterday in Barcelona, at the Ernest Maragall ceremony, announced that he would become a militant.
