The polling forecasts for Junts are so dire that not even a favorable ruling on amnesty from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) would be able to eliminate the internal atmosphere of drama into which the pro-independence party is beginning to sink.
Months ago, the European ruling to be announced this Thursday, which could open the door to Carles Puigdemont’s return to Spain, was unanimously interpreted within the party as a possible turning point, as the stimulus that could revitalize the party by recovering its leader after nine years in “exile”.
But that perception is beginning to fade in the face of the now hardly questionable poll predictions, which, one after another, depict a torrential flight of votes from Junts to Aliança Catalana, the secessionist party with a xenophobic bias led by Sílvia Orriols.
“We are already losing 50% and almost 30% are going to Aliança,” admits a Junts leader in conversation with EL MUNDO when asked about the impact of the latest CEO poll, the Catalan equivalent of the CIS, which, indeed, in a survey published on Thursday, indicated that Puigdemont’s party would only retain half of the voters who supported it in the May 2024 regional elections and that 28% of them would head towards Aliança.
“There is nervousness and concern about the clear trend of all the polls and also about the uncertainty regarding the CJEU ruling,” admits another neoconvergent leader, contradicting the party’s official discourse, which challenged the CEO poll with data indicating its ability to recover at the polls from the fateful forecasts of the Generalitat’s CIS in recent contests.
“Of course there is nervousness and this nervousness is leading to paralysis and inaction. To not change the messages or the spokespeople,” insists this same leader.
The party’s critical sector, self-called the “pragmatic” sector, warned weeks ago that Puigdemont showed signs of being “spent” after his candidate was defeated by the protégé of Xavier Trias in the primaries to choose Junts’ mayoral candidate for Barcelona.
The latest data only reaffirm the analysis of a faction that waits crouched for the party president’s collapse to try to orchestrate a “medium-term” alternative that returns the party to the ideological paths of the old Convergència, now that ten years have passed since its extinction.
“For the pragmatic and realistic sector of Junts, the CEO results were not a surprise, but rather the sad confirmation that the political strategy and priorities set both in Congress and in the Parliament do not connect with what many people who would want to vote for us expect. They do not sympathize with either the substance or the form,” they insist, while citing a section of the Catalan CIS poll that analyzes the “capacity of parties to resolve political matters.” Only 4% believe that Junts has the capacity to “promote coexistence in Catalonia,” to “maintain order and public security,” or to “manage public services.”
“The CEO results penalize the Octoberist rhetoric [focused on claiming the 1-O referendum and its legacy] without any results and Junts’ projection as a party that is neither useful nor predictable,” the same sources add.
These same voices emphasize that the party “has not achieved either comprehensive immigration powers, nor Catalan in Europe, nor the effectiveness of the amnesty law” and that some of its latest commitments such as “the VAT reduction for the self-employed” have also not been implemented by the Government. All these reasons, which Junts cited to justify its break with the Government of Pedro Sánchez back in October 2025, are what, according to these sources critical of the party leadership, explain its decline.
The same sources point out bluntly that the considered leader of Junts’ pragmatic faction, former Economy minister Jaume Giró, “has been warning for three years that this would happen.”
Giró left the party executive last September but did not give up his membership and continues to publicly and periodically defend positions opposed to Puigdemont. Notably, he calls for supporting regional financing if the principle of ordinality is respected, while the pro-independence party leadership leans towards rejecting it, considering that the benefits for the community would be much less than those publicized by Sánchez and Oriol Junqueras. Sources from the neoconvergent executive indicate that “Catalonia would only receive an extra 200 million; because it would collect 4,700 but contribute 4,500 to the State.”
The CEO indicates that in Congress, Junts would fall from its current seven crucial deputies to four or five seats. And that, by contrast, ERC, the main promoter of the new regional financing model, would go from the same seven parliamentarians in the Lower House to ten or eleven.
