Barcelona: Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists hope to win power in Spain’s Catalonia region in Sunday’s election to prove their appeasement strategy is more palatable than Carles Puigdemont’s separatist agenda.
The prosperous northeastern region, home to about eight million people, voted on Sunday to elect deputies for 135 seats in the regional assembly.
Polls show Sanchez’s Socialists ahead of rival Puigdemont’s ERC, led by current separatist JxCat and current regional leader Pere Aragones.
Puigdemont, 61, became Catalonia’s leader in October 2017 during an independence bid that has sparked Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.
Although he fled to Spain to avoid prosecution, he is still active in the politics of our region, leading JxCat from Belgium. With the amnesty bill soon to become law, he hopes it will improve his chances of voting.
For Sánchez, seizing power from the separatists who ruled the region for a decade would be a major victory in his efforts to overcome the crisis caused by the secession proposal.
It will also allow you to hit the restart button during the last business period that started in November.
Until now, right-wing opposition and his wife’s corruption probe led to his resignation late last month.
A victory for the Catalan Socialist Party will allow the region to turn over a new leaf after 10 years of absence,” said Salvador Illa, 58, who was Spain’s health minister during the pandemic.
Although the Socialists won the most votes in the last regional elections in February 2021, Illa failed to form a majority government. The separatist parties came together to form a 74-seat coalition.
Since becoming Spain’s prime minister in June 2018, Sánchez has sought to defuse the Catalan conflict. The Middle East continues talks with the ERC and pardoned separatists detained for their role in the 2017 split.
At the end of last year, instead of allowing the separatists to vote for a new term in parliament, he passed an amnesty law for those still wanted by the justice system.
Under the terms of the bill, Puigdemont, who fled Spain to escape prosecution after the independence bid, can return home after more than six years in exile.
Puigdemont is currently banned from entering Spain, where he has an arrest warrant.
So he is campaigning for Sunday’s election from a French beach town near the Spanish border, with opinion polls showing his support has risen in recent weeks.
The independence movement has stalled a bit (since the separatist bid in 2017), but I think Puigdemont’s candidacy has sparked enthusiasm,” Arnau Olle, a 29-year-old IT professional from a town near Barcelona, on the campaign trail at the weekend in Argeles-sur-Mer.
Puigdemont, who has been Catalonia’s leader since January 2016, wants to lead the region if the separatists retain their majority and JxCat comes out on top.
But that could be complicated given the divisions in the independence movement and the emergence of an ultra-nationalist Catalan union in the coming months. No other party wants to sign a deal with him, even though polls show he could win a few seats.
Sunday’s vote for Puigdemont was also not because he promised to quit politics if he didn’t win.
Polls show the Socialists will win around 40 seats, meaning they need allies to reach the 68 they need for a governing majority.
A coalition may involve the left and ERC Aragonese, but it may also lead to the inclusion of the independence movement.
Ernesto Pascal, a political analyst at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, does not see the alliance as undermining Sánchez’s left-wing government, whose weak parliamentary majority depends on the support of JxCat and the ERC.
“No party has any interest in pushing for Sanchez’s resignation and new elections.”
He pointed to the possibility of a new right-wing government, which has vowed to reverse any move for amnesty for separatists, which could change the scenario dramatically.
