The accumulation of opinion polls that leave Ernest Maragall out of the battle for Barcelona - when he was the winner of the 2019 elections - has caused the first major setback of the campaign, with the Republican Left (ERC) party president Oriol Junqueras stepping into the ring over the subject. In an attempt to emulate his role in the Catalan elections of 2021, when he carried the weight of the campaign for current president Pere Aragonès and in the final week surged ahead of Junts candidate Laura Borràs, Junqueras has raised the tone against Colau (BComú) and Collboni (PSC) and has fantasized about a large conservative alliance that is afraid that ERC will win the municipal elections on May 28th.
Accustomed in recent years to running the electoral race from the leading positions, ERC has suddenly found itself with an unforeseen and dangerous situation. A poor result in Barcelona more or less drags down the positions in other metropolitan municipalities - Gabriel Rufián's role in Santa Coloma de Gramenet and in the urban beltway loses its lustre - and takes away the party's chances of controlling the Barcelona provincial council. In the case of the Barcelona metropolitan area, Junqueras has made a commitment - one which paid off in 2019 - to position the party as the alternative to the PSC. With this policy, he aspired, this time, to wrest the presidency of the Provincial Council from the Socialists and place himself in a position identical to that of the former Convergència and its leader Artur Mas between 2011 and 2015: with the party occupying the presidency of the Generalitat (Mas), the mayoral office of Barcelona (Trias) and that of the Provincial Council (Salvador Esteve, ex-mayor of Martorell).
All this, together with the capillarity of being the Catalan party that has presented the most electoral lists - 804 candidates - and all its strength across the territory, allowed ERC to enter the municipal elections with optimism. The fact that the main challenges now seem unattainable has turned the campaign upside down, just 48 hours after it started. The biggest difficulty lies, without a doubt, in Barcelona, where the PSC, BenComú and Junts are stealing its space and may continue to bite into it until May 28th.
Hence, the strong message about the existence of a large conservative alliance against the Republicans, when if Junqueras's party has done anything in recent years - very clearly since 2017 but also constantly since 2014 - is to try and capture the space that used to be able to vote for the PSC or CiU, and over which it claimed hegemony. The Socialist voters moved away from ERC with the arrival of Sánchez in the Spanish government and those from the Pujol-ist area have seen Trias as their voting haven for those who seek to get rid of Colau and try to reposition Junts in less radical positions.
We'll see what the polls say next weekend and if Junqueras' shake-up has served to help ERC at all.