The absorption of the municipal results by the two main Catalan pro-independence parties is going less smoothly than what one might have assumed on election night. The Republican Left (ERC) is going through its first major crisis of the Junqueras era, the result of the serious fall in its vote count, where it has gone from being the leading political force in municipal Catalonia to the third-ranked, with the loss of its most emblematic mayoralties such as Tarragona, Lleida, Sant Cugat, to name three very important ones, and the vote collapse in Barcelona, where it went from first to fourth place. Together for Catalonia (Junts) wins Barcelona, which helps, in part, to eclipse painful defeats such as the mayoralties of Girona and Reus, its virtual disappearance in the metropolitan belt and its fifth position in Tarragona - behind the Catalan Socialists (PSC), ERC, the People's Party (PP) and Vox - or its fourth place in Lleida, these two being cities where it previously co-governed.
The force shown in Barcelona, and the possibility that Trias could become mayor, acts as a shock-absorber at present. But that's all. In part, because the capital of Catalonia has been largely won by former mayor Xavier Trias with a very personal style, at a great distance in substance and approach from the discourse of Junts. Trias is a member of Junts, he is everyone's friend, but he is the closest thing to a free agent. He listens, but then he decides, something that in current politics is hard to find. Pedro Sánchez's move, hastily calling elections, helps Trias secure the mayoralty, since if no contrary plan is hatched, he will be the mayor when the city council is constituted on June 17th. A left-wing tripartite is unfeasible today, due to the divergent interests of the PSC and ERC. Virtually impossible - although not completely - is the other alternative, involving support from the PP for a PSC mayor with the votes of Barcelona en Comú. In theory this is not an option given the Spanish elections just around the corner, since the PP are a long way from wanting to give the Socialists a break and even less so in an operation in which the Comuns are at stake. But the words of Salvador Illa affirming that Trias will be mayor "if nothing happens" are a warning. And in Socialist language, he may mean that everything that has to do with joint lists of Junts and ERC in Congress would be in the opposite line of "if nothing happens."
Let me say that my impression is that the debate on a joint list for July 23rd by pro-independence parties, or the call by the president of the Generalitat for a common front of sovereignists to defend Catalonia against a hypothetical PP-Vox government are two sides of the same coin and they are partly, perhaps not totally, posturing. You can't change hate to love overnight, at least in politics, and there are many disagreements between Junts and ERC. There is list of mutual reproaches that is so long that it would need much more than one article to cover it, beginning with the unilateral expulsion by president Aragonès (ERC) of his vice president Jordi Puigneró (Junts), which is central to the difficulty of redirecting the crisis.
But it's another thing completely for the two parties to play the game of dumping some of their problems on to the other and looking for easy ways to strengthen themselves in the face of the rise of the PSC. In this regard, the Republicans' strategy of broadening its base and reaching agreements with the PSOE has proven unfeasible, partly due to an inability to negotiate in Madrid. ERC thus need to turn towards its pro-independence sectors and that means turning around the ocean liner without having yet defined the new port. Junts, for its part, believes that the collapse of ERC in the municipal elections can help it when it comes to recovering its former hegemony in that space. Without any shared trust but just a mere handshake, and with the intention of undermining the electoral base of the other. We will see how this whole mirror game ends, in which each one party is doing what it believes helps most to weaken its opponent. In any case, the only possible unity that I consider feasible today is, at most, that of joint candidates for the Senate. And that, with many question marks.