Rufián and Colau, to the rescue of the Spanish left

Two Catalans, Ada Colau and Gabriel Rufián, come to the rescue of the Spanish left. 

Colau will be the candidate for the presidency of the Spanish government for the Broad Front and Rufián, who will be head of the list for Esquerra, will campaign for Podemos in Spain. Podemos will not run in Catalonia and two Podemos candidates will join the Esquerra list as independents, in positions where if they do not provide much value and do not improve Esquerra's results in the last elections, they will not enter Congress.

To begin with, we note that the Broad Front has remained a Broad Front ma non troppo, because Podemos (Irene Montero, Ione Belarra) is not there. Rufián stepped forward, and in an attempt to get everyone out of the "what's in it for me" mentality, he closed an agreement with Podemos. Comuns, Sumar, Esquerra Unida, and Més Madrid took it very badly; they said that Rufián's move had been divisive and that it was a disappointment.

At Esquerra, this morning, they asserted that neither Rufián nor Esquerra will enter into a broad front, that this will not happen, and even less so with Colau as a candidate, taking into account that Comuns and Esquerra share an electoral border in Catalonia and that the fact that Colau was invested as mayor of Barcelona in 2019 with the votes of Manuel Valls to unseat an pro-independence mayor like Ernest Maragall is a historical grievance that will remain forever.

And what does Esquerra have to say about it? For months, Junqueras and Rufián had been talking about how to take advantage of Rufián's momentum to achieve a goal they both agree on: that the PP and Vox do not govern, that an investiture majority like the one that kept Sánchez in the Moncloa is reproduced, because Esquerra starts from the premise that the PSOE and the PP are not the same. Conversations with Rufián have had a difficulty for some time now, which is that they are not face-to-face, because Rufián lives in the Basque Country and comes to Barcelona very little, and this has been pushing them apart, not just physically. In the party, they believe that, despite this distance, nothing has broken between Rufián and Esquerra, that at no point has he threatened to leave, that he may have doubted at some point but let's see who leaves a hundred-year-old party to go square a circle of personalisms like the one that exists to the left of the PSOE.

It is true that Esquerra will maintain its acronyms in Catalonia, but it is no less true that by turning Podemos into its Spanish ally, ERC places itself to the left of the PSOE, and its leaders have always said that they did not want to be the left of the PSOE but rather to replace it in Catalonia.

Podem gains more than Esquerra, and Rufián does not gain as much as he would have liked.

Good morning.