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. Neither will the good electoral prospects of Sílvia Orriols' party, which polls, such as this weekend's in La Vanguardia, place as the second force in Parliament. The resolution adopted by the governing committee is firm, although some members of the leadership do privately argue for running in the general elections so as not to leave their electorate orphaned. "There is no debate," insist party sources, however.

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 a free, prosperous, secure, and Western Catalan state," she retorted.

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 for Lleida on X.

But why is Aliança Catalana not running in the Spanish elections? Orriols, who is the one with the final say in the party's important decisions, considers that it makes no sense to enter Congress and participate in the governability of a state it wishes to stop being a part of. The leader of the formation has even threatened to abandon the party if it were decided to make the leap to Congress, with the aim 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 obtain seats in the metropolis nor more public remuneration for the party, but to restore the Catalan state, free, prosperous, safe, and Western, and this is done neither from Madrid nor from 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 present themselves 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 in 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 that they would achieve representation. In any case, discursively, it suits Aliança well to point out that the rest of the independence parties go to Madrid looking for an "employment agency".

Be that as it may, the party's statutes do provide for the possibility of Aliança running in the Spanish elections and even regulate how candidates should be chosen. Thus, articles 95 and 96 establish that heads of 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 organization'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 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. Given that Aliança is the fastest-growing party in Catalonia, there is a large group of voters who will be looking 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. Junts could take 23% of the voters who would opt for Aliança in the Catalan elections, and Santiago Abascal's party would take 22%.

Vox does not hide, in fact, the symbiosis it hopes to build with Aliança, even if it costs them votes in Parliament. The Spanish nationalist far-right is increasingly using Catalan to campaign in the Principality, knowing that its result in Catalonia could 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. The party's national board, the highest political decision-making body between national assemblies, will agree on this at a meeting at the 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 obtained two deputies, 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 party, 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.