Together for Catalonia is like the blanket that aims to cover both Laura Borràs and Xavier Trias and that falls short. Transversality is an aspiration of every party that aspires to govern and it was a defining feature of the Convergència, but now, when the president of the formation sits down, the candidate for Barcelona is revealed, and vice versa. It would be necessary to take care of the mayoral aspirant, who can achieve the institutional power that Junts has been losing, but the fear of a split in the party means that his number two, Jordi Turull, avoids for the moment traumatic decisions about the future of Borràs, convicted of fraud and falsification of documents.
Within the party there are those who maintain that the dependence on Carles Puigdemont has left Junts anchored in 2017 and its consequences, while Catalan society has been changing its record and concerns. It is not that independence has evaporated, but they sense that concerns are taking other paths, that the pandemic has repositioned priorities and that today public interest swings between inflation and drought, to give two examples.
The other soul of the party maintains hope in the upheaval of Puigdemont's return and claims to sustain the tension before the State. Although few are seriously thinking about another shock like the one in 2017, it is a matter of keeping the flame alive and rearming before an ERC delivered to the Government of Pedro Sánchez. And we must not forget a possible leakage of votes from Junts towards an electoral list promoted by the ANC.
This internal dichotomy will not be resolved even if Trias gets a good result in Barcelona, as some hope. The contradictions will continue after the municipal elections if Junts has to decide, for example, whether to revalidate the pact with the PSC in the Diputació de Barcelona.
The socialists build bridges with Junts to help recover their participation in institutional politics, in Catalonia and, if possible, also in Madrid, to have a possible new ally. The question is to discern on which panel the battle between PSC, ERC and Junts will be fought, in this electoral cycle. A few years ago, the competition revolved around the axis of secession, between supporters and detractors, and between independence supporters. This last battle is still active, but the other one has become more nuanced and the management of self-government is taking shape. Which of the three is best placed on that front?
The republicans believed that, with Junts out of government, they would finally emerge as the Convergència del 21st century, the backbone party of Catalan society, in which a majority trusts to lead the country. But with only 33 deputies, their room for maneuver is very limited. ERC had to give in to the PSC to approve the budget, but the drought decree has put them back in front of the mirror. Faced with day-to-day difficulties, Pere Aragonès recovers the pro-independence accent with the idea of a Canadian-style law of clarity. The problem is that, when unilateralism has gone so far, anything else seems like entertainment for a part of independence.
Salvador Illa is also trying to place the PSC as the haystack of Catalan politics. It offers the restoration of institutions after more than a decade of upheavals and the recovery of projects relegated these years, such as the B-40. The two fronts allow him to delve into the contradictions of Junts, but especially of ERC.
The candidacy of Trias is a symptom of the will of Junts to present itself again as the party of order that was once CDC and that today, paradoxically, is trying to embody ERC and the PSC. The resolution of the pulse with Borràs will demonstrate the extent to which Junts is committed to the path opened by Trias. As the journalist Núria Orriols explains in her book Convergència, one of the successes of that formula was the message of "doing", rather than just "being". Seizing the moment is essential and an excess of "being", if the identity effervescence has loosened, can lead to a corner of politics.
