Gabriel Rufián has managed to demonstrate what had been suspected for months: he is the ERC leader with the most powerful voice and the one most capable of making himself heard outside of Catalonia. His proposal to unite the peripheral left-wing parties of the state into a single candidacy to confront the foreseeable onslaught of the PP-Vox bloc has been widely discussed by almost everyone, except for the top leaders of his party. Everything indicates that they didn't like Rufián's snobbishness (just as neither did the BNG and Bildu), and it wouldn't be surprising if Junqueras verbalized it soon. In any case, what we can deduce from this episode is that Rufián has become the most visible face and voice of the Republicans, and also that his political agenda is quite different from the official party line.
Rufián's specific proposal has a precedent, because some of the plurinational or peripheral left-wing parties (Bildu, BNG, ERC, and Ara Més) already ran together in the European elections. But in these elections, Spain is a single electoral constituency, and the combined votes make more sense. In the case of Spanish elections, it's very likely that these forces would have more votes individually—an argument, by the way, that ERC has always used when Junts has proposed unitary lists. On the other hand, it might make sense for the parties of the so-called plurinational left, ideally including Compromís and the CUP, to agree on minimum programmatic frameworks and align their votes to become decisive in the event of a lack of clear majorities.
Rufián's popularity and his ability to connect with niche voters far removed from the pro-independence movement could be an asset for ERC if it weren't for the fact that, from the outside, the Colomeño leader gives the impression that he's going it alone: he barely speaks about Catalan politics (not even when Pere Aragonès was president), instead serving as the hammer of the Spanish right, while treating the PSOE, Sumar, and Podemos as comrades in the trenches, with varying degrees of complicity. To this we must add the aggressiveness with which he speaks about Junts. Many Junts leaders are equally aggressive toward ERC, it's true. But uniting the plurinational left at the expense of dividing the Catalan pro-independence movement is a strategy that the average ERC voter doesn't like and doesn't suit Junqueras: first, because there's always a transfer of votes between ERC and Junts; And secondly, because the coexistence between the social axis and the national axis (speaking clearly, the ability to agree with PSC-Comuns and Junts) is one of the party's assets.
In this sense, Rufián has positioned himself on the periphery of his own political space. And yet, ERC needs his visibility. It needs to channel it and harmonize it with Junqueras's leadership. The question is: will it allow itself to be led by a soloist like Rufián?
Organizations and individuals who want Catalonia to become a state or to have a higher degree of sovereignty must understand that, in the current context, any divisive or exclusionary strategy is reckless. Those who, from a certain reductionism, want to dismiss Junts as "the right," without further qualification, are mistaken. So are the purists who point the finger at the wrongdoing and those who, with a certain strategic myopia, want to renounce forging alliances with other instrumental sectors, both inside and outside the country. The fact that Sumar, Podemos, and Comunes have renounced their complicity with Catalan sovereignty proves the skeptics right, but it is objectively bad news. Internal divisions and isolation appear on the list of reasons why the Process did not go well.
