The president of the Catalan People's Party (PP), Alejandro Fernández, is the last candidate from the parties with current representation in the Catalan chamber to be nominated for the elections to Parliament on May 12th and he has reached that point triumphantly. Because it is no small thing the guerilla war that he has embarked upon at the Spanish level of the party - in fact, he has overturned the plans that Alberto Núñez Feijóo had for Catalonia. Be that as it may, the heterodox conservative politician from Tarragona, who prefers Ayuso to the Galician, and breathes more comfortably with the rhetoric of Aznar or Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo than with that of Rajoy, has got what he was aiming for and it can be said that his particular internal battle has not been easy at all.
With Alejandro Fernández, the choice has been made to appoint a street fighter, a declared battler against the the independence movement who is more likely to capture votes from Ciudadanos (Cs) than from the Socialists (PSC). He will, however, have the task of trying to fish in the Socialist pond among those who are detractors of the amnesty - especially, in the Barcelona periphery. The latest polls show that there is a not-so-small band of voters in the Catalan capital's conurbation who supported the Socialists in last year's municipal and Spanish elections and are not very happy with the passing of the amnesty and Pedro Sánchez's concessions to independentist demands.
But the appointment of Fernández also means the failure of Feijóo, who, from the first moment, tried without success to find his 'Josep Piqué', twenty-five years after Aznar achieved it. The doors that the president of the PP has knocked on have gradually closed, some ruling it out from the start and others - the most diplomatic - delaying their definitive 'no'. In the end, he was only able to choose from among the party's candidates - and not from all of them, since the best-placed ones didn't want the place either - and he preferred not to improvise less than two months before the Catalan election.
The appointment of Fernández also means the failure of Feijóo, who from the first moment tried, without success, to find his own 'Josep Piqué', twenty-five years after Aznar achieved it.
With eight parliamentary groups in the Catalan chamber, Fernández joins an election line-up that will offer little that is new in terms of the heads of each list. In fact, with the exception of the candidate for the CUP, Laia Estrada, the other seven were already party leaders in February 2021. Thus, we once again see Salvador Illa, Pere Aragonès, Carles Puigdemont, Jéssica Albiach, Carlos Carrizosa and Alejandro Fernández himself. But even if the list leaders are the same, less than fifty days before the elections, this journey to the polls will be nothing like that of three years ago.
Illa starts with a significant advantage, Aragonès is the president and Puigdemont has announced that he will return from exile - where he has been since 2017, in Waterloo - for the investiture, if he has a majority to obtain it himself, despite the risk of ending up in prison.