Operation Rufián: three questions

For days, the indeterminate "Operation Rufián" has been the subject of analysis and commentary in the media. Few things are more pleasing than speculating about indeterminate proposals. The spokesperson for Esquerra Republicana in the Congress of Deputies is demonstrating, once again, his great ability to place himself in the center of the dance and make everyone talk about him. This is not a minor skill for a left-wing politician, in these times.

Gabriel Rufián has great political intuition and a lot of anticipation. He is the only protagonist of the Process who has managed to reposition himself in the post-Process Catalonia —and above all, in Spain—. While other political leaders, one might say, are trapped in another historical time, he has reinvented himself effectively. To the point that nothing remains of the Gabriel Rufián of the Process.

Thanks to this ability, Rufián is practically the only ascending political asset of the left and sovereignty in a reactionary moment on a national, state, and global scale. Rufián has had the virtue of identifying his strengths and has concentrated on them. Thus, he has been growing the character, and has managed to penetrate TikTok, a space where the far-right was strong and the left could not position itself. Thanks to this skill, he alone has managed to distance thousands of young people, especially boys, from the influence of the so-called fatxosfera. This is not, in absolute terms, a minor contribution.

So it is very wrong for anyone, from the perspective of sovereignism and the left, to continue looking over their shoulder and be unable to recognize the importance that Rufián's figure can have in a complex political cycle as it looms. Neither the malice that some of his attitudes can cause nor the narrow view of partisanship should be an excuse not to understand the magnitude of the character and his potential impact.

And even more so now, when Rufián seems to have grasped the spirit of the times better than others, and has taken the initiative, in contrast to the general inanity. The argument he defends is simple and common sense: faced with the threat of the extreme right, the left and sovereignism must "do something." Its great virtue is that it is a message that everyone understands, and that is vague enough to be polysemic, which allows everyone to understand what they want to understand.

However, just as the relevance of Rufián is underestimated, he himself runs the risk of overestimating himself and squandering his political capital. Current politics is short-term, and one wrong step can deflate the balloon in no time. Despite his popularity, Rufián is not —neither in the State nor in Catalonia— an undisputed leader of the political space he wants to represent. That is why it is not proving easy for him to concretize his proposal.

For now, there are three major questions he must face. The first is the fit of this proposal with Esquerra Republicana. Because Rufián would be very mistaken if he thought he did not need his party. Without a well-rooted political space behind him, these kinds of charismatic leaderships can, at best, have an ephemeral impact. But they are exhausted and wear out quickly, and in the end, nothing remains. We have seen this many times in the last decade, thanks to the hyper-personalism of the so-called new politics.

The sociopolitical space of ERC is, like any space that aspires to be somewhat large, complex and diverse. The fitting of pieces is delicate. And in this space, the Gabriel Rufián of 2026 does not occupy a central position, neither on the national axis nor on the left-right axis. Therefore, a political operation made solely to his measure does not make much sense, and it can end up scaring a significant part of Esquerra's most natural electorate. It already happened –in another sense– with Junts pel Sí in 2015, which siphoned voters from ERC towards the CUP. At this point, we should already know that electoral coalitions do not always manage to attract the sum of the voters of all the parties that compose them. Another issue is that the proposal ends up being that Rufián leads an electoral offer in which ERC is not present, but that would be an even riskier electoral move: defection can generate rejection among some sectors of voters.

The second question, which cannot be avoided, is whether this operation makes any sensein the event that it manages to attract all the parties to which it appeals, which seems unlikely for now. If it fails to unify all this space, the operation's performance in arithmetic terms will be, at best, debatable. Perhaps it can help save Podem's furniture a bit, which is not going through its best moment.And it could attract a few thousand additional voters to Esquerra, but it would not significantly change the balance of power at the state level. And, in fact, it could even be counterproductive in terms of parliamentary representation for the state's left-wing parties.

And the third, and I would say the main, question that whoever is making this bet must answer has to do with the role of the PSOE. Pedro Sánchez – another political animal of great intuition – has decided to compete on the left and not in the center. He has understood the spirit of the times of polarization well, and now he makes left-wing gestures, especially – but not only – in international policy. This strategy leaves little free space to his left, as all the polls being published suggest. In this context, it is legitimate to ask whether the smartest thing for the sovereignist left-wing parties to do is to focus exclusively on the framework of the useful vote to stop the far right or whether perhaps they should also try to compete in the territorial dimension.