With less than a week until Catalans go to vote (May 12), Salvador Illa is still in the lead with 39/40 seats, but Carles Puigdemont is closing the gap and is already at 34/35 deputies while Esquerra continues to fall free, according to the NC Report survey for LA RAZÓN prepared with 1,000 interviews conducted between April 29 and May 3. However, the independence movement has a problem and that is that if it manages to revalidate the absolute majority that allows Puigdemont's investiture, it will be in the hands of the extreme right of Aliança Catalana and that opens a poisoned scenario in Catalan politics.
Specifically, Aliança Catalana would enter with 1/3 seats and its candidate, Sílvia Orriols, would have the key to Puigdemont's investiture as long as there is an agreement with Esquerra and the CUP, since both formations have put a red line to the extreme right. . At the moment, the pro-independence bloc (Junts, ERC, Cup and Aliança Catalana) has 64/68 seats, so the absolute majority in the Parliament, which has 68 parliamentarians, is by no means guaranteed. In 2021, the pro-independence bloc obtained the absolute majority with 74 seats, but it is evident that demobilization is going to take its toll and will remain well below that figure.
In this way, Puigdemont is on the rise and puts more pressure on the Catalan socialists, who are going to win and improve the results with respect to the 2021 elections, but can be seen again in the opposition. The Junts candidate has already launched a threat to the PSC by warning it that he “will have to assume the consequences” if they do not invest him as president, in reference to the fact that his party can remove support from the Government in Congress.
Illa has become the object of all the attacks in recent days and that seems to be the trend between now and Sunday: the independentists to try to wear him down and prevent him from winning comfortably, since that would legitimize him to try the investiture; and, the PP and Vox to try to attract the maximum constitutionalist vote. At the moment, Illa resists in 39/40 seats thanks to great voter loyalty (she maintains 79.1% of 2021 voters) and an important transfer of Esquerra (84,000 votes) and the Commons (51,000 votes).
The PSC candidate's options to be president go through two paths and, in both, he needs a comfortable victory: on the one hand, joining together with Esquerra and the Commons, something that does happen now (they are at 68/71 seats); and, on the other hand, with a simple majority (in the second round) if the constitutionalist bloc achieves a large majority with respect to the independence bloc.
Except for the PSC, which has a much more focused profile in Illa and has taken up some right-wing flags as the reinforcement of security, the rest of the leftist formations are falling and hard. In this sense, Esquerra would lose the Generalitat and would go from 33 seats to 24/25 while the Cup would fall from nine to 4/5 and the Commons would hold on slightly and end up at 5/6 (now it has 8).
While the left is in free fall in an autonomy in which high taxes and immigration and security are two central campaign issues, the right continues to rise. In this sense, the PP would reach 13/14 seats and recover the position of fourth force in the Parliament after a decade of crossing the desert. The popular ones grow at the expense of Ciudadanos (70,000 votes), Vox (43,000) and PSC (36,000).
Vox would resist in 10/11 seats and that would make the constitutionalist right achieve the best records since the first regional elections: between PP and Vox they would reach 23/25 seats, above the 19 that the PP achieved alone in 2012.
Finally, the emergence of the pro-independence extreme right in the Parliament with 1/3 seats is already taken for granted, which is essentially fed by Junts (39,000 votes), Esquerra (14,000) and Vox (8,000).