Gabriel Rufián has managed to demonstrate what has 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 Rufián's blunder didn't please them (just as neither did the BNG and Bildu), and it wouldn't be surprising if Junqueras verbalized it soon. In any case, what is clear from this episode is that Rufián has become the most visible face and voice of the Republicans, and also that his political agenda is very different from the official party line.
Rufián's specific proposal has a precedent, because a portion 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 niches of voters far removed from the independence movement, could be an asset for ERC if it weren't for the fact that, from the outside, it gives the impression that the leader is acting on his own: he barely talks about Catalan politics (he didn't do so even when Pere Aragonès was president). president), and instead of amplifying Junqueras's rhetoric, he has decided to establish himself as the hammer of the Spanish right, while treating the PSOE, Sumar, and Podemos as fellow trench workers, with varying degrees of complicity. Added to this is 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 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 second, because the coexistence between the social and national axes (to put it bluntly, the ability to reach agreements 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 be a state or 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 remove Junts from the scene simply because it is "the right," without further qualification, are wrong, but so are the purists who point to it. botiflers Left and right, and those who, with a certain strategic shortsightedness, want to forgo forging alliances with other sectors inside and outside Catalonia, even if they are temporary and instrumental agreements. The fact that Sumar, Podemos, and Comuns have renounced their complicity with Catalan sovereignty proves the skeptics right, but it's objectively bad news. Internal divisions and isolation appear on the list of reasons why the Catalan independence process didn't go well.
