The influence a party will have after an election is always uncertain, but we can agree that Junts will hardly ever be in as advantageous a position as in this legislature. A combination of seven essential votes and a president willing to do whatever it takes gave Puigdemont a power over Spanish politics that few have been able to enjoy.
Read more The CJEU ruling on amnesty will not immediately resolve Puigdemont’s exile
He used that power to obtain an amnesty. That is, for himself. Junts may claim the victory that humiliating the Spanish nation in this way represents for the independence movement and rightly so, because they are correct. But political theory is one thing and public perception another, and here the paths of the party and the people it claims to represent in their purest essence diverge more and more.
When on June 9 we published a mid-term Catalan survey in EL MUNDO, two alarms went off: that of the PSC, which lost four points in voting intention and any chance of repeating government; and that of Junts, which fell seven points and was in a technical tie with Aliança, the new sensation of the independence movement. A few days ago the CEO, the so-called Catalan CIS, confirmed this trend, sinking Puigdemont even further.
In this latest study, people were asked about the problems of Catalans and the answers were housing (28%), immigration (10%), and public safety (10%). The “Catalonia-Spain relations,” the only reference to independence, appeared at the bottom of the list with 2%.
Catalonia has been the region that has most enthusiastically applied the Government’s housing policies and has just been awarded the highest number of applications for immigrant regularization. Junts could have used its influence to change these things, but it has not. Its strategy of extracting concessions in the form of supposed competencies created such a strange dynamic that people simply stopped listening. Now the plan is to show that they have nothing to do with Sánchez, but of course, Sánchez remains governing until the end of days thanks to his seven votes.
Junts bets everything on Puigdemont’s return, but there is something that not even a hundred Pumpidos can achieve, and that is to erase his nine years abroad. Living far from the land you claim to represent is a much deeper problem than the mere absence of the leader. In 2017, when Puigdemont crossed the border, neither housing nor immigration were pressing problems in Catalonia. It is hard to accept no matter how much you are told.
A quick look at his recent activity confirms the suspicions: a message to the “norcatalans” about the fires, something about the use of Catalan in a company, and a tweet about “Spanish repression.” Silvia Orriols, leader of Aliança and his direct rival, has denounced the “Salafist mosques preaching against the West,” criticized the “sanitary cordon” against her, and clamored for housing in this tone: “We are heading more towards communist expropriations than towards the Catalan tradition that protected property.” Two different worlds.