Catalan Alliance, destined to look for the candidate for Barcelona within the leadership

BarcelonaThe governing committee of Aliança Catalana is made up of six people: Sílvia Orriols, Oriol Gès, Jordi Aragonès, Lluís Areny, Aurora Fornos, and Franc Massaneda. From this hard core of the party, the candidate for Barcelona in the municipal elections will most likely emerge. Areny has the best chance of being the mayoral candidate in the Catalan capital, as ARA has learned, although Aragonès could also be. "Right now there is an 80% chance that Areny will be the candidate," say party sources.

In this way, Aliança Catalana would have thrown in the towel in its search for a recognized personality. The doors that public figures have slammed in their face have led the leadership not to want to waste any more time and to define a candidate with some heavyweight from the party now, with less than a year to go until the elections. The list leader for the Catalan capital was to be announced by Sant Jordi, but a week before, the party president revealed that the chosen person had backed out, without it ever being revealed who it was.

In this scenario, Orriols, who is the one who makes the decisions, would lean towards positioning Areny as the candidate, repeating the formula from the last Catalan elections. Then, given the rivalry between Gès and Aragonès, who wanted to be the list leaders, the party leader chose Areny as a Solomon's decision with the other two members of the leadership behind her.

Orriols likes Areny's profile, the party's communication secretary, because he has no ties to any party, unlike Aragonès, who is the cousin of former Generalitat president Pere Aragonès and was a member of Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC). "Areny does not have this political past," emphasize these same sources, who take it for granted that he will be the chosen one.

Aragonès has in his favor that he is one of the party's founders. Secretary of studies and programs since its creation, he is the ideologue of Aliança and the one who outlines the discourse and strategy to follow. With the organization secretary, Oriol Gès, he is the best-known face of the party, apart from, obviously, Orriols. Both, however, have the handicap that they are not from Barcelona and do not live there either. Areny lives in Sant Quirze del Vallès, where the party also plans to contest, and Aragonès in Pineda de Mar.

Jordi Amela, the regional president of Aliança Catalana in Barcelonès, lives in Barcelona, but Orriols considers, according to sources, that he is not well enough known to lead the candidacy. The party's former press chief is one of the main people responsible for the expansion in Barcelona and its metropolitan area. Amela has been walking the city for months and campaigning on social media, making him one of the most active militants.

Amela, with great oratory skills and an affable demeanor, has the support of a significant number of party members in the city, who consider him the ideal person to lead the list because he has been linked to the party from the beginning. "He is the preferred candidate for a good part of the party's base in Barcelona," says a member of Aliança from the Catalan capital, who emphasizes that "he is not one of those who has just arrived looking for a seat." However, this track record does not seem to convince the party leader.

The candidate who was to be

The choice of the list leader in Barcelona is proving to be a difficult undertaking. The first option was the former Minister of Economy for Junts, Jaume Giró. The former Junts leader admitted that Aliança Catalana offered him to be a candidate in Barcelona in the municipal elections and that he rejected it. But the name that had the most options to be the mayoral candidate was that of the publicist Lluís Carrasco, whom the leadership trusted could be convinced after he did not close the door to entering politics. The offer reached him in November and he refused it in January.

to be the mayoral candidate in Manresa and the candidate for Barcelona in ParliamentGanas de volver a veros".

Carrasco assures that he was not the candidate who backed down: "I didn't back down because I never said yes." The dates he provides support this. Carrasco told them no in January and, weeks later, on February 17, at the Hotel Palace conference, Orriols said they already had the mayoral candidate and that he was "a man and well-known." In this crossing of names, the former Barça president, Sandro Rosell, is also another personality who was sounded out, although the contacts were "informal" and did not go any further.

Cuevillas, one of the last to be sounded out

And more recently, Aliança sounded out a well-known face from Junts in its takeover bid against this party. This is lawyer and former deputy Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, who has precisely taken the step of presenting himself to be the candidate for mayor in the Catalan capital, but in Junts, the party he belongs to. The former secretary of the Parliament's bureau reveals to ARA that they met with him twice in March, three months before he decided to run in the Junts primaries.

"A person from above offered me to be the candidate for mayor, emphasizing that Junts was a declining brand," he reveals without wanting to specify who it was. He refused the offer at the first meeting: "It is a xenophobic party with which I share nothing. I am a convinced Junts member, and I believe that this space has been and continues to be central to Catalanism." Despite not wanting to know anything about it, they summoned Cuevillas to a second meeting with an improved offer. "They insisted again and told me that I would also be the head of the list in the Catalan elections because Sílvia Orriols would run again for Girona," he explains. It was an offer reminiscent of what Front ex-councillor Sergi Perramon received at the end of the year, to be the candidate for mayor in Manresa and the candidate for Barcelona in the Parliament. "I told them again, no way, that I shared nothing with them," Cuevillas concludes.