The municipal elections are set for May 23 next year, but the countdown has already begun. At least for Junts per Catalunya, which this Saturday is organizing a “municipalist convention” in Vilafranca del Penedès with a view to defining a strategy that will serve to try to retain its dominant position in the Catalan town councils. In 2023 it achieved more than 330 mayoralties, slightly ahead of ERC, of the 947 municipalities in Catalonia. But the tailwind stopped blowing and the Junts leadership is working hard to activate its officials and militants, overwhelmed by polls that now predict a flight of votes in which Aliança Catalana represents. This Saturday’s event was supposed to serve to announce the names of the mayors with whom the party wants to compete in some of the most representative cities, but the plan has been twisted.
Deputy Glòria Freixa has officially joined the fight to be mayor of the party in the Catalan capital. An ambition that Jordi Martí Galbis, a disciple of Xavier Trias, and the representative in Congress Pilar Calvo also have. The lawyer is considering whether to also take the step. The primaries were something that the party wanted to try to avoid with the appointment of Josep Rius, former secretary of Carles Puigdemont, but the appointment has been poisoned and internal disputes have emerged.
The general secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, and the party president Carles Puigdemont, meet frequently at the former Catalan president’s residence in Waterloo (Belgium). There they agreed on the convenience of calling up the party’s municipal officials during the month of May, as they entered the last twelve months prior to the election. It took them a while to publicly schedule the call because the date that seemed ideal to them was not released until April 14. It was then in the League against Atlético de Madrid and, therefore, they were left without a place in the final that will be played this Saturday. Turull is an Espanyol fan, but he assumed that calling for militancy with a Barça Champions final in the middle could compromise attendance at the event.
One of the objectives of Junts is to take advantage of the Vilafranca convention to enhance internal cohesion and outline common positions that serve to mark a clear line on issues such as housing, taxation, Catalan language, citizen security or immigration. These are issues that the party identifies as important to gain public visibility at a time when it barely has spaces of power and feels the encouragement of the pro-independence extreme right that Aliança Catalana represents.
Junts, like Convergència before it, has been accustomed to having good territorial implementation, but the rise of the ultra party led by Silvia Orriols, especially in inland areas of Girona and Lleida, will make the fight more expensive in town councils that seemed to be the preserve of Puigdemont’s party.
Furthermore, Junts has lost visibility and influence because it does not govern in any of the four Catalan capitals and lives in the shadow of the PSC and what Turull insists on defining as “the tripartite”, in reference to the support provided by the socialists, ERC and the Commons.
In Vilafranca, he will act as host. He has already been named mayor of Junts, with the mission of recovering the mayoralty that the party lost in 2023 in favor of the PSC, but there are vacancies in important municipalities, such as Tarragona and Badalona or, above all, Barcelona.
