Support for federalism increases by more than five points and is second only to own state option

BarcelonaGood news for the Catalan Socialist Party: the Centre de Estudis d'Opinió (CEO) poll published this Friday not only ratifies its good electoral prospects, but also points to an outstanding growth of supporters of federalism, the territorial model defended by the Socialists. Despite the fact that the independent state continues to have the most supporters (35.1%) in Catalonia, the possibility of becoming a state in a federal Spain is, for the first time since 2013, the second most preferred option with the support of 27.8% of respondents (22.6% in the latest barometer). The option claimed by Miquel Iceta is slightly higher than that of the current autonomous state, which gets 27.4% of support, while those in favor of losing self-government and become a simple region of Spain represent only 5.5% of the 1,500 respondents.

Interestingly, however, it is En Comú Podem voters who are most in favour of federalism (73.7%), while only 39.7% of PSC voters are in favour of the federal state. The majority (48.5%), on the other hand, prefer to maintain the current state of the autonomies. The state itself is in the majority among the pro-independence parties, especially in the case of the CUP (92.7%), but also in JxCat (86.7%), PDECat (66.7%) and, finally, among ERC voters (61.2%). Among the voters of En Comú Podem only 7,9% support independence.

When the question about independence is binary, in fact, the yes continues to lose, despite increasing to 45%, 1.4 points more than in the November barometer. Despite the increase of almost one point of those against independence to 49.9%, the growth of those in favour puts the yes vote less than 5 points away (4.9). The majority of those polled, in any case, think that Catalonia has an insufficient level of autonomy (60.6%), compared with 28.6% who think that the current autonomy is sufficient and 6.3% who think that Catalonia enjoys too much autonomy.

Territorial issues aside, the unease about the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic is evident in the responses. Amongst those surveyed, 81.5% consider the political situation in the country to be bad or very bad and up to 92.6% believe that within a year -if there are no changes as a result of the pandemic, once the elections are held- it will be the same or worse. The economic situation is also considered bad or very bad by 76.6% of those who responded to the survey; 87.3% believe that the economy is worse than a year ago and only 38.3% believe that it will improve in a year's time. However, 42.6% of the total are quite interested in politics.