Catalunya en Comú and Podem have strengthened their alliance and have reached an agreement to run together in the next municipal elections and thus avoid the dispersion of the vote that already penalized them in 2019 in the municipalities in which they presented themselves separately.
Partners in Congress and in the Parliament, the two Catalan parties of the non-independence left have agreed to extend the relationship they have in these two institutions to the City Councils.
His plan is to present himself under the name of the En Comú Podem brand, registered as a party.
The intention of the two forces is to overcome the more than 200 candidacies (out of the 947 municipalities of Catalonia) with which they were presented four years ago and avoid their more than discreet results of 2019, which only allowed them to keep the mayor's office in Barcelona as a great milestone.
The Catalan capital is excluded from the agreed formula now because the party believes that the brand of Barcelona en comú, of Mayor Ada Colau, the embryo of Catalunya en Comú, a confluence of several left-wing parties, is already consolidated there.
The code of the commons establishes that the positions have a limit of two terms extendable to three if the militancy so authorizes.
The bases already validated last Saturday unanimously that the mayor opts to revalidate the mayor's office.
In October, Colau revealed to this newspaper that she was considering facing a third term.
She only needs now that she officially accepts the proposal.
In these elections, En Comú Podem faces the challenge of leaving the metropolitan area and expanding throughout the rest of Catalonia and recovering the presence lost by that division.
The commons were the fourth Catalan force in the municipal elections of 2019, with 8.67% of the votes and 258 councillors.
Podem -which presented half a hundred ready- was ninth with 18 mayors and 0.57%.
The dispersion of the vote caused the left-wing candidacy to be left out of metropolitan councils such as Sabadell, Terrassa and Sant Cugat, where they now have prospects of achieving good results, according to the polls.
"It is a commitment between two sister forces and we aspire to achieve a greater presence in Catalonia as a whole", said Joan Mena, spokesperson for the party, accompanied by Lucas Ferro and Concepción Abellán (Podem) and Candela López,
The division that Commons and Podem reflected in 2019 is almost an exception because the reality is that they function practically as a block, far from the convulsive fractures that they experienced in the past.
Even so, the purple brand has not been integrated into Catalunya en Comú and maintains its own personality but far from any tension.
In fact, the leader of the commons in Parliament, Jéssica Albiach, is part of both organizations.
The commons, with Colau at the head, greatly sympathize with the proposal of Yolanda Díaz, Vice President of the Government and her project of a transformative left.
On the day of Sant Jordi, the main staff of the commons attended the presentation of the book by Pablo Iglesias and the next day they participated in an act with Díaz.
With the desire to flee from controversy, Mena has stressed that the commons and Podem agreement must be read in a "Catalan key".
“They are two Catalan political forces that ratify their will to go together.
But it is clear that we have strategic alliances with sister forces of the State as a whole, therefore I hope that Yolanda Diaz will pass through here, but also many other people who are part of the United We Can space, such as Irene Montero, Alberto Garzon, ”said the spokesperson. .
The two parties lost the representation in Sant Cugat, Sabadell and Terrassa when attending separately
The list is based on the axes of republicanism, environmentalism and municipalism and was born, according to Ferro, with the desire to remain.
The example to follow is the Badalona City Council where they finished the dispute and got two councillors, one from each party.
"We want to avoid electoral competition," Mena stressed.
The municipal division has generated delicate situations such as that of the Tarragona City Council where the budgets have not been approved due to the opposition of the councilor of the coalition, who represents both formations.
The assembly of the commons supports the accounts but not Podem's.
The forecast of the two parties is that together they will be able to overcome the barrier of 5% of the votes that grants representation and not repeat the failures that going apart entailed.
In Terrassa, the space went from being the second force -six councillors, 19% of the votes- to being left out of the Consistory by being the sixth force (commons, 4.8% of the votes) and seventh (3.6%).
Together they would have added more than 8% of the votes and obtained council positions.
In Sabadell, a different situation arose: Podemos was the sixth most voted party and added a councilor.
The commons were left out.
The mayor was later expelled by the formation and has been key to sustaining the mayor's office of the PSC.
In Sant Cugat, they were seventh and ninth in force, behind the PP, which was also left without representation.
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