The Catalan business community and its organizations still maintain a noticeable distance from the far-right party Aliança Catalana, led by the mayor of Ripoll, Silvia Orriols, despite polls forecasting a spectacular electoral rise for them. Ahead of Junts and competing with ERC for second place. This coldness may be due to the fact that business decision-making centers have their own gauges, which lower the scale of that polling rise by several degrees.
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The leader of Aliança Catalana has barely held a few meetings with the economic world. The most public one was with Emilio Cuatrecasas, the renowned Barcelona lawyer, now distanced from any guild or professional responsibility beyond his personal investments, such as the Empordà golf course, where the meeting took place last January. The most recent was a lunch with a territorial employers’ association from Vallès. There will undoubtedly be more. Businesspeople want to see the far-right leader in person and are curious to hear her proposals. There is excitement and overflowing attendance when any of these meetings are organized.
When invited, Orriols ventures into the reference territory of the former Convergència, that of small business owners and the middle classes—outside the sphere of the large Barcelona business community, where things are quite different and the far-right faces more difficulties—knowing she will have an audience very willing to listen to her proposals and eager to get to know her. That social fabric now feverishly longs for the old pujolism that the procés discarded. They feel orphaned of a political reference and a practical program aligned with their interests.
Disenchanted with Junts, the theoretical heir of pujolism, and lamenting that it neglects the current economic and political priorities. Their reading is that the independence party has remained stuck in a procés that ended almost a decade ago, with the October 1, 2017 referendum and Carles Puigdemont’s escape. It is time for concrete proposals. The disappointing recent data on State investment in Catalonia accentuates this feeling: “Where is the influence of PSC, Junts, and ERC in Spanish politics?” is a lament once again heard.
In those few and discreet meetings, adopting a humble stance, Orriols flatters their ears: in Catalonia, too many taxes are paid; the wealth tax should disappear; the culture of effort must be promoted; laziness should not be subsidized (reference to absenteeism); Aliança’s independence movement will not lead to the madness of repeating the October days. Calm and good business.
They share Orriols’ economic ideas; but not her xenophobia; immigrants are essential
Many leave delighted: “this woman is right.” Orriols’ connection with the audience surprises even the organizers themselves. But there is still a long way to go before having their vote in the bag, according to them. Most do not share her xenophobic ideology. Many of their companies would not last a day without the immigrant workers who ensure their production. And they know that Orriols’ solutions are not as easy or simple as she presents them.
If there were elections to the Parliament now, that political orphanhood of the Catalan economic fabric would be expressed in enormous dispersion and fragmentation of the vote. Some, undoubtedly, would end up in Aliança; but the share of Salvador Illa’s socialists, intermittently acting as a temporary refuge party, could also be relevant, having defined a priority plan, although later struggling to apply it and attributed by business ranks with some loss of the momentum they seemed to have at the start; even, to a lesser extent, ERC, in this case among sectors more sensitive to the national axis.
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This while the question of how long the current Spanish legislature will last is cleared up and pending the reformulation of Junts, once the amnesty is implemented and the independence party is forced to resolve its dilemma between being a party of order or a shock troop.
In the noble halls of the Barcelona business community, which has delegated these matters to Josep Sánchez Llibre, the president of Foment, they continue to think that Junts is the main bet; which does not mean exclusive, if the PP ends up governing someday. It will undoubtedly be so during the rest of the current legislature. Their seven votes in Congress are worth their weight in gold. A lever of legislative and political influence in Spain and recognition among their business peers. Also later, when the new old rules of the political game apply: those before the procés and after the amnesty’s application, if parliamentary arithmetic allows it. They will not lack incentives from the corporate world, where they believe there is still time, before upcoming elections in Catalonia, for Junts to evolve and rebuild ties with the economic fabric.
That would open the door to another alternative dance in Catalonia. In the Parliament, the votes of PP, Vox, Aliança, and Junts could end up embodying an opposition majority, which would not govern, but act as a brake on unwanted initiatives of the Government that would be formed.
Big business trusts that Junts will become a force of order after Puigdemont’s return
A kind of mirror of what is now happening in the Congress of Deputies, when Junts joins PP and Vox to block specific measures and laws presented or promoted by Pedro Sánchez’s government and the left-wing parties that support it in parliament. Agreements of limited scope.
A further step in the long recomposition of the party system in Catalonia, broken by the shocks of the procés and unable to generate a new model, pending the resolution of criminal cases. The economic forces, once again, want to intervene in that process seeking to achieve the emergence of a formation that faithfully represents their interests. And it continues.
