The candidacy called Lliures per Europa, headed by Catalan president in exile Carles Puigdemont, will win this month's European election in Barcelona, according to a survey carried out by Feedback for El Nacional. The second most-voted for list will be that led by his imprisoned vice-president, Oriol Junqueras, Ara Repúbliques.
The poll, based on 800 telephone interviews, was carried out between 9th and 14th May, coinciding with the start of election campaigning in Spain. Among the other results were that Ernest Maragall (ERC) and current mayor Ada Colau (Barcelona en Comú) are fighting to win the Barcelona municipal election the same day (link in Catalan), but that neither party looks anywhere near winning outright.
This shows that voters are picking different options at the local and European levels: Ara Repúbliques is linked to Maragall's ERC, whilst Lliures per Europa is linked to JxCat which is projected to come fifth in Barcelona, despite winning in Europe.
Third place in Europe would go to anti-independence Cs with 16.34% of the vote (Lliures per Europa are on 27.78%, Ara Repúbliques on 22.62%), in a practical tie with current Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrell's PSOE candidacy on 15.43%. Unidas Podemos-Catalunya en Comú, related to Colau's party, would be fifth with 8.94%, whilst PP, in government in Spain until last summer, would get just 5.34% of the vote in the city. Far-right party Vox, growing quickly in Spain in general, is down to get 1.53%.
Overall result
Barcelona tends to be a good barometer of the overall result in Catalonia for European Parliament elections, but seats are decided at the Spanish level in such votes. In the last election in 2014, ERC won in both Barcelona (21.77%) and Catalonia (23.69%), with CiU, forerunner of JxCat, coming second with 20.86% in the city and 21.84% in the whole of Catalonia.
Candidates
Despite his party not scoring well in terms of how many respondents say they'll vote for it, Ernest Urtasun from En Comú gets the best rating as a politician with an average of 6.43/10. He's followed by Oriol Junqueras on 5.58, whilst Puigdemont, despite his party winning, only gets a 4.29, hinting at highly polarised opinions of the former president. Puigdemont is the most-known of the politicians on 99.3%, followed by Junqueras on 98.4% and Borrell on 95.8%. When it comes to the most positively rated candidate, Urtasun, only 28.4% of respondents said they knew who he was.
The survey's technical details are available in the Catalan version of this article.