The recent elections in Catalonia have set the tone for Spain’s political landscape ahead of the next European Parliament elections. Discussions on a future regional government will influence the campaign for seats in Brussels. A Euronews superpoll suggests the centre-right will prevail, followed by the Socialists.
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Despite their regional dimension, Catalan elections traditionally have a major impact on Spanish politics as a whole, also when it comes to European elections.
According to Spanish political circles and public opinion, the difficult ongoing negotiations between Barcelona’s political forces to form a regional government are very likely to influence the campaign for the June 9 vote to leave the EU.
The painstaking negotiations are just beginning. The Catalan Socialist Party (PSC, a member of the Strasbourg S&D) won but did not win enough seats to govern Catalonia.
The separatists lost ground, but the party that lost the most votes was Pere Aragonés’ ERC (Catalan Republican Left, allied with the Greens in the European Parliament).
The Catalan Republican Left supports the central government led by Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and has temporarily shelved its initial intention to secede by adopting a negotiating stance with the Madrid government.
In exchange, the center-left and left-wing administration granted amnesty to some of the separatist leaders who organized a separatist referendum in 2017.
The Catalan issue has deeply divided Spain’s political circles and society as a whole since the referendum, which went ahead despite being banned by the central government at the time.
Most of the Spaniards and Catalan supporters who opposed the amnesty voted for the centre-right and right.
National loyalist parties, the People’s Party (PP) and Vox, have also had relative success in Catalonia – the PP is part of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and Vox is part of the national-conservative European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
Pedro Sánchez’s rise and fall in popularity was also linked to the Catalan issue.
Moderate conservatives and right-wing political forces gained support for their firm opposition to the Socialist government’s proposed amnesty for organizers of the separatist referendum.
The amnesty has not yet been implemented, but it is likely to give Catalan independence leader Carles Puigdemont the opportunity to return to Spain.
Spain managed to defuse the Catalan crisis thanks to the clear rejection of the separatist option by European Union institutions and member states.
Other polarising factors influencing the Brexit vote in Spain include farmers’ discontent, gender and LGBTQ+ issues, and growing anti-immigration sentiment, all of which have important implications for the debate in Brussels.
Who are the Spanish political parties’ front-runners?
The European elections will be crucial for Spain’s political dynamics and its future.
According to the Euronews polling centre, the PP (People’s Party) remains at the top of the list of people intending to vote in the EU elections, although its support appears to be slowing down slightly, down 0.3% compared to March 2024.
Dolores Montserrat, a Catalan member of parliament, is the PP’s leading candidate in the European Parliament elections. She was health minister in Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government (PP-EPP) when Catalonia held its separatist referendum in 2017.
Nationalist conservative party Vox chose a Catalan politician to top the ballot: Jorge Boussade, a former member of the far-right Falange Española (Hons), a legacy of the Francisco Franco era.
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The moderate conservatives’ choice to field a strong candidate from Catalonia is part of a strategy to garner as many votes as possible in the demographic and electoralally influential region.
It is also a strategy to politically challenge the autonomous region, a traditional stronghold of regional nationalist parties, socialists and leftists.
Pedro Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has chosen a prominent politician as its front-runner for the European vote: Teresa Rivera, the current Minister of the Green Transition, who will one day represent Spain in the European Commission.
The Catalan nationalist vote distributes seats among the various groups in the European Parliament, with the few MEPs from the Catalan Republicans becoming members of the Green group along with other Spanish regional nationalist forces.
The still-active separatist party Junts, led by Carles Puigdemont, is in the unaffiliated group.
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If Puigdemont returns to Spain from self-declared exile, it could influence the region’s voting intentions.
“But the amnesty decree has yet to be signed by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and it has many political implications that go far beyond the current Catalan negotiations and next June’s EU elections,” said Juan A. Soto, a conservative analyst at Fortius Consulting.
On the left, SMALU has lost its support base since March, according to Superpoll, with a voting intention of 9%. Its leader, Yolanda Dias, has given SMALU’s five or six MEP candidates the freedom to choose between joining the Green or European Left group.
However, the political situation in Spain remains highly fluid and public opinion on the elections could shift rapidly in the coming weeks.
