Gabriel Rufián will continue to be the visible face of Esquerra Republicana in the Congress of Deputies and the party is studying an alliance with Podemos. ERC has confirmed today that its until now spokesperson in the Lower House will once again be the head of the list for Barcelona in the general elections on November 29.
The decision will be formalized today in a meeting of the Executive and, in the coming days, the details of the candidacy will be finalized with the celebration of the different territorial congresses. On October 20, the party's internal bodies are scheduled to approve the final lists that will appear on the ballots for Congress and the Senate.
"I want to represent Esquerra Republicana and I am trying to do it with minimal conditions to be able to face what is coming with sufficient guarantees and arrests. And accompanied by other left-wing and anti-fascist forces because this cannot be won alone. I will try until the end and I hope ERC wants it too," the politician stated for the last time on social networks last Thursday.
With the independence leadership ruling out any participation in the Frente Amplio, in the last few hours some collaboration formulas have been negotiated with Podemos as an intermediate point. One of the options would be for Rufián to be able to participate in events of this party outside Catalonia and for, in the region, the purples not to compete against ERC and ask for the vote for the Republicans. All of this, furthermore, conditional on the outcome of the negotiations between the Frente Amplio and Podemos to join the coalition created by Movimiento Sumar, Izquierda Unida, Más Madrid and Catalunya en Comú.
In this way, the tug-of-war between Rufián and the ERC leadership during the last year, which threatened to last for several months if the electoral advance had not been given, comes to an end. At least for now.
In addition to several public demonstrations, in recent months Rufián had held a round of public meetings with different leaders of the left in Spain to address the need to find a formula to converge electorally with the aim of avoiding a PP Government with Vox. In February, he did so together with the deputy spokesperson for Más Madrid in the regional Assembly, Emilio Delgado, in the Galileo Galilei Room, where they defended the optimization of the vote for formations to the left of the PSOE province by province.
At the beginning of April, the Republican spokesperson in the Lower House held an event in Barcelona with the Podemos MEP and former Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, who in primaries to be held on October 14 and 15 should be ratified as the party's headliner for 29-N. Rufián then insisted on multiparty unity and said that it was "essential" that Podemos be included in any alliance of this type.
The closing of this political tour came with the former vice president of the Generalitat Valenciana Mónica Oltra (Compromís), with whom she proposed that the left make an agreement province by province, proposing primaries where there was no consensus to bring together the useful vote around the strongest candidate.
Throughout this time, Rufián advocated stopping the dispersion of the vote against Vox in the distribution of seats in the medium and small electoral constituencies. Which led to proposing a "plurinational coalition" with all the progressive forces to the left of the PSOE in view of the general elections. That is, the parties that Sumar have made up in this legislature (among them, Compromís and Comuns), plus Podemos and the independentists ERC, EH Bildu and BNG, in addition to extra-parliamentary forces such as Adelante Andalucía.
But Rufián encountered the reluctance of the sovereigntist formations, starting with his own. "Esquerra will not tell a political force from another country how it should present itself," was one of the first responses of the Republican president, Oriol Junqueras. "Esquerra will present itself in Catalonia, as Bildu will do in Euskal Herria and the BNG in Galicia," said the ERC leader in February, citing two formations with which they have shared candidacy in the European elections. The main reason for doing so in that appointment is the unique constituency with which you vote.
The general secretary, Elisenda Alamany, also spoke in the same vein: "The best antidote against the extreme right and authoritarianism are left-wing projects like ours, of national defense and with territorial roots." And the same about hypothetical tutelage or dependencies on third parties: "The strategy is clear, we are a central force in Catalonia and without anyone deciding for us from Madrid." Of course, both Junqueras and Alamany have defended behind closed doors, and until this week, that Rufián was the ideal candidate to lead the Republican group in Congress in the next legislature.
Where ERC does boast of collaboration between parties is in the joint candidacy with EH Bildu for the Senate announced yesterday, a formula that they already used in July 2023 and that includes working alliances in Congress.
