Catalan election gives voters chance to leave ‘lost decade’, says Salvador Illa

Catalonia’s imminent election offers voters a chance to leave behind a “lost decade” of unstable and divisive rule by pro-independence parties and instead choose a government that will focus on unity and improving “neglected” public services in the wealthy north-eastern Spanish region, according to the socialist frontrunner.

Salvador Illa, a former central government health minister who leads the Catalan branch of Spain’s ruling socialist party, said the region was ready for change almost seven years after the failed, unilateral bid to secede plunged the country into political crisis.

“This election could – and should – open a new era in Catalonia that I’d define in two words: the verbs ‘unite’ and ‘serve’,” Illa told the Guardian in an interview ahead of Sunday’s vote.

“‘Unite’ because we need to stop focusing, as we have over the past few years, on issues that divide Catalan society and which try to put it on either side of a line. We need to underline and emphasise the common bonds – regardless of our ideas, our language, our background or our feelings – that we have as Catalans.

“And ‘serve’ because we need to underline that public services, such as education, healthcare, housing, transport and safety, will be the chief priority of the regional government.”

The snap election was called in March by the Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, a member of the moderate pro-independence Catalan Republican Left party (ERC), after opposition parties voted down the budget proposed by his minority government.

The ERC had governed in coalition with Junts per Catalunya, the centre-right, hardline pro-independence party led by the self-exiled former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, until festering disagreements led the latter to abandon the government in October 2022.

Polls suggest Illa’s Catalan Socialist party (PSC) is on course for a comfortable win – taking about 28.5% of the vote and about 40 seats in the 135-seat regional parliament – but will need the support of other parties to form a government.

Junts looks set to finish second with 21.2% of the vote and 34 seats, followed by the ERC, with 16.7% and 26 seats. The conservative People’s party (PP) and the far-right Vox are in a tight race for fourth place, respectively polling 8.7% and 12 seats, and 7.6% and 10 seats.

Behind them are the leftwing Comuns Sumar alliance, the far-left Popular Unity Candidacy, and the new, far-right Aliança Catalana party.

Despite its regional nature, Sunday’s election could have serious national ramifications as Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, relies on the ERC and Junts to back his minority government in congress.

Puigdemont – who fled to Belgium to avoid arrest over his role in masterminding the illegal push to secede in 2017 – is the most high-profile beneficiary of the controversial amnesty law that Sánchez introduced to secure the support of the ERC and Junts.

He is planning to return home soon but has warned Junts may ditch its support for Sánchez if it doesn’t like the makeup of a PSC-led government.

Despite Junts’s resurgence in the polls, Illa said Catalonia had changed dramatically over the past few years, adding the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and worries about the state of public services had all diminished the importance of independence as a political issue.

Illa acknowledged some people remained unconvinced by the amnesty – which the PP and others have decried as a cynical piece of political manoeuvring – but said the move and other conciliatory gestures had greatly reduced tensions.

He also accused the ERC and Junts of being too preoccupied with independence to improve Catalonia’s declining public services or to prepare for the drought the region has suffered for the past three years.

“When you talk to people about what matters to them, they talk about the drought, about education – which was always excellent in Catalonia, but which is now lagging behind the rest of Spain – about infrastructure, about safety, about healthcare,” he said.

“It’s about public services that have been neglected and which have got worse over the past 10 years under Junts and [ERC] governments. It’s been a lost decade.”

Illa said that while he was prepared to talk to any parties about creating a PSC-led government if he won on Sunday, his invitation did not extend to the Vox or Aliança Catalana.

Vox, whose rapid rise from the fringe to the political mainstream was largely fuelled by the Catalan independence crisis and anti-immigrant campaigns, has been seeking to portray Sunday’s election as a choice between it and a “corrupt elite that wants to convert Catalonia into an islamised region”.

Similar language has been used by Aliança Catalana’s leader, Sílvia Orriols, a self-confessed Islamophobe who has accused “the political elite” of selling out Catalonia.

Illa said such words were in keeping with the “demagogic, hate speeches” of the far right elsewhere in Europe. The danger, he added, was that competition from the extreme right too often led the centre-right to abandon the middle ground.

Jordi Turull, Junts’s general secretary, has linked immigration with crime, saying Catalonia needs to be able to deport immigrants who reoffend. In a speech in Barcelona province on Tuesday, the PP leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, appeared to associate Catalonia’s high crime rates and housing problems with immigration.

“The big risk is that these parties influence the discourse, political agenda – and, worse still, the deals that are cut – when it comes to the parties on the right,” said Illa.

“The risk is very worrying and that’s why we have to be very clear when it comes to drawing red lines over the far right and its hate speech.”