CARLES CASTRO, BARCELONA 13/09/2020 03:10
The GAD3 survey reveals reduced losses of independence suffrage queer potential vote of moderate nationalism
The potential space of moderate nationalism – an offer in line with the traditional performance of Convergency i Unió – draws a very small perimeter, in light of the data from the latest GAD3 survey for La Vanguardia. The translation into absolute figures of the poll estimates, applied on a 69% share, reveals that the losses of the vote opposing independence quadruple those between the pro-independentist electorate. Therein lies the reason that, for the first time, independence can exceed the bar of 50% of the votes cast.
Specifically, and compared to the outcome of the 2017 elections, JxCat, Esquerra and CUP would yield to abstention almost 125,000 voters, according to poll screenings, while the rest of the parties would be left in that cesspit about 440,000 ballots. The main one affected by these decisions would be Ciudadanos, with 700,000 fewer voters.
But PSC’s earnings (more than 125,000 voters over their three-year harvest), PP (almost 60,000) and Vox (160,000) would only cover half of Cs’ losses, to which almost 70,000 common voters would have to be added. In total, the space opposed to secession would be left at home to one in five voters in 2017.
By contrast, in the unilateral independence space, JxCat’s possible losses (also close to 20% of its three-year-old count) would be absorbed by more than 50% from the rise of ERC. And only CUP leaks – mostly towards abstention, although a small group of defectors would choose to reheat in Junts – would raise sovereign suffrage losses to about 6%.
Absolute estimates
Sovereignism left in the abstention 125,000 voters of 2017; the other parties, 440,000
Such an expectation would mean that the moderate nationalism would only have a potential voting reserve that would not reach 125,000 votes. That is, just over the 103,000 that Democratic union took in the last elections he ran for (in 2015). The only consolation of the Catalan centre now would be that if, indeed, the participation fell below 75%, those ballots would mean more than 3% of the vote and allow it to enter the cast of seats (with a maximum of between three and four deputies).
In any case, it would be a lean harvest, which would only be worth its weight in gold in the event that unilateral independence lost an absolute majority. And that would only happen if JxCat, ERC and CUP were to award more than six points of the joint electoral quota awarded to them by the survey.
Of course, once on the dance floor of the electoral call, moderate nationalist offers could aspire to seduce those lukewarm independence voters, who cast a tactical or reactive vote but would not really aspire to the breakup with Spain: these are some 300,000 sovereign voters who, according to the poll, would not vote for secession in a self-determination referendum or whose basic objective would be to improve Catalonia’s funding.
At the same time, the other bag of potential candidates to vote for moderate Catalan formations could be found in the nearly 370,000 voters who voted for Ciudadanos in 2017 and will now hypothetically abstain. How many of them could support today a new version of the CiU that some already voted for before their independence metamorphosis? That is, if moderate nationalism were again also offered as a useful ideological vote of center and center right.
Moderate suffrage nursery
The Catalanist center may appeal to some Cs orphans and tactical secessionists
The potential recipients of this offer should be those voters who voted for Ciudadanos in 2017 but who will no longer do so now, who are ideologically located in the center or centre-right and whose identity is mixed: as Spanish as they are Catalan. And that bag, from what the survey data suggest, could reach 180,000 orphaned Cs voters.
Hence, if Catalan moderate nationalism were able to incorporate, on the one hand, the fugitive voters of independence and, on the other hand, a large part of Cs’s genuinely centristic defectors, their critical mass would approach 300,000 voters. And that would mean 8% of the vote and ten seats. With that harvest the Third Way would no longer be a narrow track lane.
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