Agreements and disagreements

Rufián has ended up becoming a kind of half-candidate between ERC and Podemos, an idea that until not long ago might have seemed outlandish and that now passes as a kind of compromise solution. Between now and Friday, it remains to be seen whether his maneuver succeeds in leading the rest of the parties "to the left of the PSOE" that are looking to constitute the so-called Broad Front –Moviment Sumar, Comuns, Més Madrid, and Esquerra Unida– to present a single ballot in the elections, as many of their voters and some of the parties that want to join but without diluting their acronyms (as happened in 2023 with the creation of Sumar) are asking for. This is the case of Compromís, in the Valencian Country, and of Més per Mallorca and Més per Menorca, in the Balearic Islands. A single ballot would be the clearest electoral message that the left could send to its voters, and for Gabriel Rufián it would mean the validation of his thesis on the need to unite everyone who has the concern of stopping the extreme right in Spain. A frontist message and thesis, unprecedented in a candidacy for the general elections of a Catalan pro-independence party. The other thing that obviously remains to be seen is how this new configuration affects the electoral results that ERC may obtain in Catalonia. As a counterpart in the negotiations between the two parties, Podemos has renounced running in Catalonia for the benefit of ERC, but it is unlikely that the rest of the Broad Front parties with electoral aspirations in Catalonia will want to do the same.

Junts, through Miriam Nogueras, makes an announcement that is also singular, if only because at some point it will have to cease to be true: they promise not to invest what they call “a far-left government” (that is to say, the sum of the PSOE plus all those mentioned in the previous paragraph, a far-left as soft, small, and furry as Juan Ramón Jiménez's donkey Platero) nor “a far-right government,” which, much more accurately, would be the appropriate designation for the sum of the PP and Vox, with which Junts has voted repeatedly throughout the last legislature on various key issues. It is a bold approach because, depending on how the correlation of forces turns out, it could lead Junts to irrelevance or to once again have the deciding votes to unblock majorities. In any case, at some point they will have to lean towards one or the other, if only via abstention: pretending that a Catalan party goes to the Congress in Madrid only to talk about Catalonia may please the voters, but it is not what happens in reality.

The variables are many and can be combined in so many ways that predictions become more and more volatile. Another one, which may seem extemporaneous but is not so much: if, as some analysts foresee (like David Remnick, in The New Yorker), in the United States midterm elections a blue wave occurs that weakens Trump and could put him before a stage of political, media, and judicial suffocation, how can this affect the Trumpists and far-right populists around the world, and also the Spanish ones?