With his head bowed and accompanied by the leadership of his party, Pere Aragonès appeared after learning of the heavy blow his Catalan Republican Left (ERC) party had suffered at the polls, falling from 33 deputies to 20 and losing almost 200,000 votes. The acting president of Catalonia accepted the "very bad results" of his candidature and noted that the "opposition" to his executive has won. For this reason, he announced that his party will go to the opposition and affirmed that it is up to the Catalan Socialists (PSC), with 42 deputies, and the Junts+ Puigdemont for Catalonia list, with 35, to "manage the new phase" from the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
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This Sunday's is the third consecutive defeat of the Republicans at the polls, after the municipal and general elections of 2023, as Aragonès himself acknowledged: "We have continued with the same trend as in the municipal and general elections. We have not been able to reverse it". "The work of the Republican, pro-independence and left-wing government has not been sufficiently highly valued, or the public has considered that it was up to someone else to lead it," Aragonès said. Behind him, also with long faces, were party leader Oriol Junqueras, the ministers of his government and candidates for Parliament, some of whom have lost their seats in the defeat.
ERC to return to the opposition after a decade
Aragonès ruled out a possible left-wing tripartite government of the Generalitat, adding the 42 deputies of the PSC and the 6 of the Comuns to ERC's 20, the only option that would add up to a majority with today's results, after the disappearance of the pro-independence absolute majority in Parliament. The ERC leader said this while announcing that his party will go over to the opposition, where it has not been for a decade: "Polarization has won and has coloured the results. It will be up to them to manage the new phase with the configuration of the new Parliament. We will assume the will of the people and we will do it from the opposition", he said in reference to PSC and Junts.
On this very difficult night - already just minutes after the polls closed, the Republicans predicted that it would not be a night of many joys - Aragonès's speech had a moment to look to the future. Acknowledging that a complicated legislature awaits them in Parliament - "we have a few months ahead of us and a legislature in which there will be difficulties" - he referred to the resilience of his 93-year-old party, convinced that the Republican Left project will continue, after results that the party will now have to analyze in depth.
In this regard, Aragonès said that he will take charge of "individual" responsibilities, once Sunday's numbers have been analysed. At the same time, however, he believes that these responsibilities must not only be individual but also collective, looking towards the direction of the party, occupied by Oriol Junqueras and Marta Rovira since 2011, considering that it is necessary to "adapt and reorient" the project of agreement with the new political reality in a Catalonia without a pro-independence majority.