Of all the Spanish general elections held up until now, there has been none in which Catalonia has been such a guinea pig. Thus, both Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo have placed it at the forefront of their respective campaigns, giving it a greater prominence than in other elections. It is the role that used to be played by Andalusia for the Socialists (PSOE) and by Valencia or Madrid for the People's Party (PP), strongholds in which the major Spanish political groups sought to win a cushion of votes that would give them a base to fight the Spanish battle, but this time, the strategies have changed and the hand-to-hand combat is taking place in Catalonia. Thus, Feijóo opened his campaign on Thursday night in the Barcelona metropolitan town of Castelldefels and Sánchez will come this way for his central campaign event on Sunday 16th.
The PSOE knows that its only option for improving the predictions of the polls is to distance itself sufficiently from the PP in Catalonia. The results obtained by Carme Chacón in 2008, when she achieved the figure that has never been repeated of 25 deputies with a slogan that today could be perfectly well recycled against the right wing - "If you don't go, they'll come back" - is today unattainable by the Catalan Socialists. But the closer they get, and the more they advance beyond the 12 seats of November 2019, the more their options will improve. Especially, taking into account that in the last Spanish elections the PP only won two seats in Catalonia. In other words, the difference was 10 parliamentarians. At the moment, the Socialists are expected to win between 16 and 18 Catalan deputies in Congress, and the PP between 9 and 10. The former as probable winners in all four Catalan provinces and the latter with options to occupy second place in the constituencies of Barcelona and Tarragona.
It is not surprising that, in this context, they have decide to throw everything at their Catalan campaigns, while, in addition, a part of the independence movement is still plucking the daisy on whether or not to go to the polls at all, angry as it is with the leadership of the respective parties, be they ERC, Junts or the CUP. Because, in the end, the 48 Catalan seats in dispute will be distributed in one way or another depending on the mobilization of the respective electoral spaces - and what will definitely not happen is for them to be declared vacant. We have to see just how this Hamlet-like dilemma will be resolved in the two weeks of campaigning that opened this Thursday, but it is hardly debatable that, in the pro-independence world, the disconnect between voters and parties is the greatest of recent years when the date to go to the polls is only 17 days away.
The pro-independence world has to decide whether it will turn July 23rd into a day of punishment for its parties and make them pay for their mistakes - of which there are certainly many - or if it will take courage and leave the retaliation for another occasion. For Catalonia to be the electoral guinea pig of the Spanish parties, with the pro-independence parties looking in from the outside, is still a great paradox of the current moment and the attitude of indifference that has taken hold in a significant part of this political space: the idea of letting the PP, the PSOE or Vox or the Comuns decide on the Catalan school system, the language, the Rodalies rail network or so many other things while the independence movement takes a nap and leaves the future of Catalonia in the hands of Madrid. It reminds me a lot of when, in Spain's 1986 referendum on joining NATO, the alliance supporters who were most Catalanist decided that they had to vote no because the key thing was to punish the PSOE. They regretted it years later, but not at that conceited moment. Politics, when decided by the stomach, always ends up having this other side.