Catalan coalition collapse reshapes region’s politics

The collapse of Catalonia’s governing coalition, due to conflicting approaches to the independence issue, marks the end of a decade of nationalist unity and it will reshape the region’s political landscape.

In a ballot held late last week, rank-and-file members of Together for Catalonia (JxCat), the junior partner in the coalition, voted to leave the government, which is led by the Catalan Republican Left (ERC). The two parties had been at loggerheads ever since forming a government in May of 2021, mainly due to their differing strategies regarding how to achieve secession from Spain.

Both parties took part in a failed unilateral bid for independence five years ago via a controversial referendum. But since then, ERC has sought a more consensual approach. The president of the region, ERC’s Pere Aragonès, has engaged with the central government in Madrid and promised to broaden support for self-determination and secession, citing the Scottish National Party (SNP) as a model.

None of the main forces in Catalonia has expressed an appetite for a snap election, given that the last one was only a year-and-a-half ago

By contrast, JxCat has taken a more hardline approach, dismissing ongoing talks with the Spanish government as unfruitful and insisting that the 2017 independence venture remains legitimate.

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“The declaration of independence has been made, what hasn’t been done is its implementation,” said JxCat’s president, Laura Borràs, two weeks ago, as the crisis in the coalition was erupting.

Claiming that ERC was failing to fulfil its commitment to move towards secession, JxCat called for a no-confidence motion to be held against its own coalition partner. Aragonès responded by sacking his vice-president, JxCat’s Jordi Puigneró, a move which in turn triggered the fateful ballot.

“Now we can say that ‘el procés’ has definitively ended,” said Jordi Sànchez, one of the leading figures in the last secession drive, referring to the political unity which had driven the independence movement since 2012, when JxCat and ERC first joined forces.

“El procés” was based on a narrow pro-independence parliamentary majority, but the splintering of the main alliance at its heart is likely to bring other, non-nationalist parties into play. None of the main forces in Catalonia has expressed an appetite for a snap election, given that the last one was only a year-and-a-half ago.

Aragonès will almost certainly also need the support of the Catalan wing of the Socialist Party of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez

Instead, Aragonès, whose ERC has only 33 seats in the 135-seat regional chamber, is expected to seek out the support of En Comú Podem, the Catalan wing of the leftist Podemos party. Although it does not support independence, En Comú Podem does advocate a referendum on the issue, and its social justice agenda is more in tune with ERC than the right-of-centre JxCat was.

Aragonès will almost certainly also need the support of the Catalan wing of the Socialist Party of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez. The Socialists support neither independence nor self-determination for Catalonia, but they maintain a functioning, albeit complex, relationship with Aragonès’s nationalists, whose pragmatism has contributed to the relative calm surrounding the territorial question. There is mutual interest here – in Madrid, the Spanish government’s fragile parliamentary majority has survived in great part due to the help of ERC.

The signs are that neither the Socialists nor En Comú Podem will offer their support cheaply. If Aragonès and ERC are able to forge and manage new, non-nationalist alliances, the independence issue will be further marginalised from the political arena as the energy and cost-of-living crises dominate. Meanwhile, JxCat, which takes on the unfamiliar role of opposition party in Catalonia, will make every effort to ensure that does not happen.