Laura Fàbregas – 30/06/2020
Lliga Democrática maintains contacts with senior members of the orange formation to seek a formula that will unseat independence.
A new Ciudadanos (Cs) for a new Catalanism. The shock that the process has caused in the Catalan political spectrum forces the parties to redefine concepts – outdated or appropriated by nationalism – and to seek new formulas after more than seven years of polarization and without permeability between blocks that has led Catalan politics in a dead end.
The operation is not easy and each formation has its own easements and reluctance, but from sectors of moderate Catalanism, led by Lliga Democrática, they have maintained contacts with senior officials of the orange party in Madrid to create a large common candidacy that serves to unseat independence in the next Catalan elections.
“With Inés Arrimadas, Ciudadanos is not the same as with Albert Rivera. We see with good eyes an approach to the space of the Catalan center-right that aims to create an alternative in Catalonia after so many years of nationalist governments, ”sources from the Lliga explain to EL ESPAÑOL.
The leadership of Ciudadanos in Catalonia denies that this possibility is on the table, but some of its intermediate cadres have already been in favor of exploring this route. Francesc de Carreras, founder of the party and who unsubscribed after Rivera’s refusal to agree with the PSOE, is also familiar with this operation.
The most relevant case in the orange party is that of the spokesperson for the municipal group of Ciudadanos in Salou, Pere Lluís Huguet. The also former president of the Consell de l’Advocacia Catalana was one of the few orange candidates who resisted the fall suffered by the party in the last municipal elections and has publicly advocated this turn to the “center” of Cs.
In a recent article in Diari de Tarragona, he argued that “there is a party, Ciudadanos, that can lead this new Catalan culture from the center, to promote the reforms that our society requires, it can regenerate democratically”.
The mainstream is to recover Ciudadanos “in its moderate version that reached 57 deputies” in the April 2019 elections. At the moment, the party in the region is resisting, but few are confident that Lorena Roldán, present leader in Catalonia, can repeat the good ones results that Arrimadas achieved in the last regional elections.
From Lliga Democrática they believe that if they find an attractive formula, with figures from civil society who in the harshest years of the process were against them and with representatives of these different sensibilities, they can turn the Catalan political board around.
In this amalgam of acronyms neither the PP of Alejandro Fernández nor the PSC of Miquel Iceta would be added. “It is not a cross-sectional space that follows the logic of the process of constitutionalists versus independentists, but rather of designing a new center-right Catalanism where Ciudadanos but not the PP of Pablo Casado fits,” the sources consulted abound.
This approach is part of the Lliga’s strategy of overcoming the policy of nationalist blocs and maintaining dialogue and exploring possible alliances with the different centrist political forces in order to rebuild that space without political offer and in which there could be up to 600,000 orphan voters.
A space that brings together many
The emergence of the Nationalist Party of Catalonia on the one hand, and the proposal by Albert Batlle (deputy mayor of Security department of Barcelona City Council) to represent a “center” Catalanism that competes with the independentist movement are one more sign of the movements that they are producing in the region.
The PNC advocates the “Scottish way” to independence. That is, ruling out unilaterality. This position in favor of independence, however, has cooled the possibility that Lliga Democrática (led by Astrid Barrio and Josep Ramon Bosch) and Lliures (by Antoni Fernández Teixidó) will join the project.
On the other hand, the Batlle project (and its Units per Avançar party) would move in the orbit of the PSC. And the councilor of the Barcelona City Council, Manuel Valls, has ruled out the possibility of standing for the autonomous elections, according to sources in this medium.
This soup of acronyms will materialize as the electoral calendar progresses. The main objective is to undo the apparent moderation of ERC and the possibility of a new tripartite in the region. And turn the page of the process definitely.
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