The PSC candidate for the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, intervenes this Sunday in a ceremony at the party's headquarters in BarcelonaMarta Perez / EFE
Salvador Illa is, for now, the target of all the targets in the Catalan electoral campaign.
The attacks on the candidate of the PSC do not escape in the rallies of all colors.
Something that is explained not only by the good expectations of the polls (the CIS anoints him as the winner) but also because it is a speech that allows the independentistas to leave in the background the issue that has starred in the previous legislature: the continuous fight between the partners of the Government.
Junts per Catalunya, ERC and the CUP exchange the odd dart but they try to put it in the background, for now.
Junts and ERC live very well in the “all against Illa”.
The candidate Laura Borràs, who yesterday visited the Seu de Urgell (Lleida), equated the former Minister of Health with a product that is returned as "useless", in reference to his management by the pandemic.
“They send us Illa as a solution, a solution to what?
Because it has not solved anything.
Surely they are getting rid of him as incompetent ”, assured the president of the formation led by Carles Puigdemont.
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ERC, remembering the duel of the last general elections in Catalonia, from which it was victorious, sees its budget and investiture partner in Madrid as its true enemy in these elections.
The Republican candidate offered himself yesterday as the effective alternative to the option "of the 155 parties and also the Ibex 35 and the judges and prosecutors, which is Salvador Illa."
Hostility against the minister has not wavered.
The polls show a very open podium between the two partners of the Government and the PSC.
Hence, it is not strange that the two formations seek a dialectical clash with Illa.
The socialist candidate goes his own way and yesterday he took advantage of the rally at the socialist headquarters of the Catalan capital to blame the independence movement for the loss of the European Medicines Agency.
In 2017, in full effervescence of the
procés
, the Catalan candidacy was in fifth position despite good expectations and Amsterdam took the orphan institution from home after Brexit.
The Agency did not come to Barcelona, defended Illa, "because Catalonia was not focused on real politics, but entangled in sterile conflicts."
At the moment the great speech absent in the campaign is the confrontation between the partners of the Government.
A voice from the ERC leadership accepts that they do not want to go into close combat with Junts because they understand that they will have to talk later.
That does not mean that attacks are not exchanged, although for now the darts are lost in the constant criticism of the former minister.
"The image of constant fighting does not go well for the independence movement," recalls that same source.
Poison darts
The Republicans have already taken their speech on corruption out of the trunk, recalling that in their 90 years of history they have not experienced cases similar to those of Convergència, the Socialists or the PP.
ERC leader Oriol Junqueras takes advantage of the possibility of holding rallies thanks to the semi-freedom regime to reinvent Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira's phrase “clean hands”.
"The usual people get very nervous, because they can't say it, because they have cases [of corruption] to stop a train," he said last Friday in Badalona.
The dart may well be for Illa or Borràs, pending if a trial is opened for, supposedly, benefitting a friend with a contract.
And it is that Esquerra Republicana also puts them in the same bag of the sociovergence (the alternation between socialism and the space that the CDC traditionally occupied) that Catalonia has governed since the restoration of democracy and for which the republicans offer themselves as the only solution.
Once again the attack is muted and reaches the government partners more sweetened.
"Is someone calling me a thief for being on the Junts list?" Replied on Twitter the number three of Carles Puigdemont's candidacy, Joan Canadell.
In Junts they know that ERC's weakest point is trying to sell it as little committed to independence and they exploit it with small open interventions for interpretation, but that they land on the edge at the Republican headquarters, in the Calàbria street of Barcelona.
Borràs, yesterday, in a speech that may also include both the socialists and their partners in the Generalitat, insisted that "management" is taken for granted and that "ambition" is lacking to "break the wall."
Ciudadanos and PP also take refuge in warning of the possible tripartite between Esquerra, the PSC and the commons and equate voting for Illa with finally supporting independence.
The orange candidate Carlos Carrizosa obviated yesterday that no poll shows even remotely that Ciudadanos can repeat as the most voted force and said that he will be "the first clearly constitutionalist president that there has been in Catalonia."
The decision of Junts to put back on the table the activation of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, which the Constitutional Court suspended in 2017, is for now the great point of divergence between the two partners of the Government. In ERC they believe that the fact that the independence movement obtains more than 50% of the votes is a milestone (some polls show it, not the CIS) but they do not believe that it justifies taking the path of unilateralism. Puigdemont himself questioned, last Saturday, that the Republicans endorsed the "mandate" of 1-O and the teachings for a second attempt to achieve independence. The ERC candidate for Girona, Teresa Jordà, responded from Lloret de Mar assuring that her training is not "daughter of 1-O". "We have been working for many more years to achieve independence," he said, and ruled out putting "dates" that could generate frustration. Will Junts and ERC get really dirty laundry? There are still 12 days of campaign and, in 2017, only 10,000 votes separated them.