Why does Aliança Catalana not run in the Spanish elections?

BarcelonaThe early call for elections in Spain will not change Aliança Catalana's decision not to run in them. Neither will the good electoral prospects of Sílvia Orriols' party, which polls, such as the one this weekend by La Vanguardia, place as the second force in Parliament. The resolution adopted by the governing committee is firm, even though some members of the leadership do defend, in private, running in the general elections so as not to leave their electorate orphaned. "There is no debate," insist, however, sources from the party.

This very Monday, after Pedro Sánchez's announcement, Orriols boasted of having brought down Sánchez's government due to Junts' rejection of the housing decree, motivated by the rise of Aliança, and said that without going to Congress, Aliança will achieve the independence of Catalonia. "I have brought down the Spanish government without leaving Catalonia... And without leaving Catalonia we will restore the free, prosperous, safe, and Western Catalan state," she snapped.

The deputy Rosa Maria Soberana has expressed herself along the same lines. "So they say they are holding elections in Spain. When they hold them in Catalonia, let me know," said the representative from Lleida on X.

But why is Aliança Catalana not running in the Spanish elections? Orriols, who has the final say on the party's important decisions, believes it makes no sense to enter Congress and participate in the governability of a state it wants to stop being a part of. The party leader has even threatened to abandon the party if a decision were made to jump into Congress, with the goal that no leader dares to reopen the debate.

"Aliança is the only Catalan party that will never run in the neighboring country's elections, because our intention is not to get seats in the metropolis or more public remuneration for the party, but to restore the Catalan state, free, prosperous, safe, and Western, and that is not done from Madrid or Waterloo, it is done from Catalonia,” she has said on more than one occasion. In this sense, Orriols denounces that both Junts and ERC do not defend “the common interest of the Catalans,” but rather run in Madrid for “clearly partisan interests.” “They have obtained advisors, their own groups, but, on the other hand, they have not achieved anything they had promised for the country,” she said at the conference she gave at the Hotel Palace in Barcelona in February.

If they were to run in Madrid, their discourse would falter, although they have no doubt they would obtain representation. In any case, discursively, it suits Aliança well to point out that the rest of the pro-independence parties go to Madrid looking for an "employment agency."

Be that as it may, the party's statutes do provide for the possibility that Aliança might run in the Spanish elections and even regulate how candidates should be chosen. Thus, articles 95 and 96 establish that the heads of the lists can be chosen through a primary process or be designated by the governing committee and ratified by the national council.

Although making the leap to Congress is not ruled out in the formation's internal documents, Orriols' intention is to modify its statutes to prevent, at all costs, the possibility of running in the Spanish elections. The party had planned to hold a congress before the summer to reform the text and introduce this veto, but for the moment this conclave still has no date.

Who will take Aliança's votes?

The fact that the Catalan far-right is not running in the general elections has a direct effect on the electoral prospects of the other parties. Taking into account that Aliança is the party growing the most in Catalonia, there is a good number of voters who will look for an alternative on November 29th. The biggest beneficiaries will be Junts and Vox, according to the latest survey by the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO), published in July. The Junts supporters could take 23% of the voters who would opt for Aliança in the Catalan elections, and Santiago Abascal's party would keep 22% of them.

Vox does not hide, in fact, the symbiosis it hopes to build with Aliança, even if it costs it votes in Parliament. The Spanish nationalist far-right turns more and more often to Catalan to campaign in the Principality, knowing that its result in Catalonia may end up being decisive for a right-wing majority in the State. As for Junts, it is the party most affected by Aliança's success and all polls point to it being in free fall in Parliament.

The CUP will decide on Saturday whether to run in the elections

On the other hand, the CUP will decide on Saturday if it will run in the state elections on November 29th. This will be agreed upon by the party's national board, the highest political leadership body between national assemblies, in a meeting at their headquarters in Barcelona, as confirmed by CUP sources to ARA. "The debate is open," the same sources say. In 2019, the CUP broke the tradition of not running in Spanish elections and won two seats, which it lost in 2023, when half of its votes vanished.

Despite the setback, the spokesperson for the anti-capitalists, Su Moreno, explained in the summer that the CUP had not "closed" the debate about running and added that it still had a "permanent debate" on this issue. Some prominent voices in the organization, such as the mayor of Girona, Lluc Salellas, have indeed defended the need to return to battle in Congress with a unitary candidacy of the pro-independence left.