The decision was announced in two stages. First, on October 27, Carles Puigdemont severed Junts’ relations with the government. Subsequently, on November 6, the party’s spokesperson in Congress, Míriam Nogueras, gave concreteness by solemnly “blocking” all the Executive’s laws. Since then a series of questions have been repeated: what will be the next step for Junts? Will you get closer to the PP? Is a censure motion possible together with the PP and Vox that brings Alberto Núñez Feijóo to La Moncloa, even if only to accelerate an electoral advance?
Demographic data in hand, if they have to choose between Feijóo and Pedro Sánchez, Junts voters prefer the latter. And with a difference. The distance is notable in three indicators with which the closeness of the electorate of one party to the leader of another is usually measured. Furthermore, it is a distance that has widened since Feijóo became president of the PP. The numbers raise an invisible wall that makes it difficult for Junts to get closer to Spain’s main right-wing party without upsetting his own electorate.
Preference as president. When the CIS asks who they prefer as president of the government among the main political leaders, 42.1% of Junts voters in the 2023 general elections answer Sánchez, according to the latest barometer, published last week. These are spontaneous responses, where respondents, even those who vote for nationalist parties, tend to focus on big state leaders, who are the ones who have a chance of becoming president. The difference between Sánchez and Feijóo is abysmal. Only 1.6% of Junts voters prefer the PP leader.
The investigation, with more than 4,000 interviews, was carried out between 3 and 12 November, i.e. at the height of the Junts’ order to the Government. Despite everything, Sánchez’s favorability level as president rose from 30.5% in the previous barometer to 42.1%. This increase has contributed to the gap between the two leaders now being greater than when Feijóo was elected PP president in April 2022.
Mark the leaders. According to the November barometer, Sánchez received a score of 5.04 from Junts voters, of which 1 was “very bad” and 10 were “very good”. Feijóo remains at 2.48, behind Yolanda Díaz (Sumar). Among major national leaders, only Santiago Abascal (Vox) gets a worse rating. Feijóo’s trajectory since his arrival at Genoa has been downward; that of Sánchez, slightly increasing.
Trust. More than a third of Junts voters have “a lot” or “somewhat” confidence in Sánchez, according to the October barometer, the last one in which the CIS questioned him. Feijóo’s result could not be worse: 0% of Junts voters trust the PP leader, who squandered the 9.7% with which he made his debut in Genoa. Instead, the Prime Minister has since gained voters’ trust in Puigdemont’s party.
Toni Aira, professor of political communication at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra-Barcelona School of Management, believes Feijóo’s “low esteem” among the Junts electorate is logical. First of all because for these voters the PP is the party that “presented 155 signatures, collected signatures against the Statute, maneuvered against the Catalans in the EU and called the pro-independence leaders coup plotters”. Furthermore, he adds, Feijóo “contributes little” as a leader “to the PP brand”. The expectations he raised as president of Galicia who “wanted to do politics for adults and spoke in Galician did not translate into anything”, adds the author of mythologists. The art of seducing the masses (Debate, 2025).
An expert in Catalan politics, Aira underlines that the jump from CiU to Junts makes the pact with the PP difficult. CiU, he says, was “a catch-all party”, with different profiles on both an ideological and an identity level. At the time of CiU, he adds, positions favorable to the “construction of Spain starting from Catalonia” could be adopted, opening up the range of possible pacts within a pragmatic strategy, what Jordi Pujol defined peix at the covesomething like “bird in hand”. “Now, beyond a certain diversity in the left-right axis, in the national axis the composition of Junts is very independent, how do we get closer to the PP?” reason.
Junts’ break with the government is, according to Aira, the result of the “impossibility of concretising” the agreement with the Executive into “something concrete to sell” to his electorate, which leads to distancing himself from the PSOE. “But this does not mean that they will vote strategically with the PP. The idea that moving away from the PSOE means moving closer to the PP is typical of analysis outside the pro-independence universe,” he adds. Motion of censure? “It wouldn’t make any sense. It was already difficult for Puigdemont to support Sánchez’s censure motion (in 2018). They will not go to Madrid to resolve the ballot for the Spanish parties, but to obtain revenue,” he adds. That Puigdemont thinks he hasn’t gotten enough revenue from the PSOE doesn’t mean he has expectations of getting it from the PP, he adds.
“It will be complicated for Junts,” says political scientist Lluís Orriols, “to weave alliances with the PP, at least stable ones, because they would represent a high risk” for Puigdemont’s party. For Orriols it is not possible to use the example of that CiU which turned to José María Aznar as leader of the nationalist camp to try to predict the maneuvers of this Junts with which the ERC competes face to face and which also faces the growing threat of Aliança Catalana.
“When the Majestic pact was signed (Pujol’s agreement with Aznar for the investiture of the leader of the PP in 1996), the situation was much more favorable for CiU than it is now for Junts. That’s why Pujol presented himself as the one who gave the majority in exchange for transfers. He could afford it, because he had nationalist hegemony and he was what we call in Catalonia Paller’s friendthe haystack stick, the one that held everything together. In that position of strength, he had room to think long-term and take risks. And even so, from an electoral point of view, this was not good for CiU. Now Junts doesn’t even have that margin. It is not in the phase of grand strategies, but of survival. And at a time of greater national polarization than ever before, a deal with the PP represents a high risk to a party’s survival. A motion of censure, even an instrumental one (just to call elections), would be extremely risky”, explains the author Trench democracy. Because we vote for who we vote for (Peninsula, 2023).
The break with the Government, according to Orriols, does not constitute a prelude to a rapprochement with the PP, but rather a “conservative operation” aimed – he states – at ensuring that Junts is not perceived as a party close to the socialists when there is a year and a half to go until the municipal elections and it is not known how long until the general ones. “So far, Junts has presented himself as the one who gets the most benefits in Madrid. But, of course, the returns of this strategy could take too long. In the short term, what we see is a closeness to the PSOE which is exploited to its advantage by Aliança in a climate of nationalist polarization and strong anti-political sentiment. This is why Junts distances itself from the PSOE, not because a rapprochement with the PP is foreseen,” concludes the professor.
Although Junts sided with the PP in votes with strong repercussions, such as rejecting an anti-corruption agency and, above all, opposing the reduction of working hours, he failed to establish a model of support for the People’s Party. Since announcing his dissolution, he has done balancing acts to try to remain faithful to the government’s “bloc” without being seen as an ally of the PP.
An example of this ambivalence was offered on November 12, when Junts saved the government from defeat by preventing the approval of a PP initiative to extend the life of nuclear power plants, a decision that speaker Nogueras assessed thus, in a message addressed to the socialists: “If some think this is a victory, the defeat is even greater.” A few days earlier, in Catalonia there had been criticism from the mayors of Junts for the decision to break with the Executive. Further proof that blocking has a cost for those who are blocked, but also for those who block.
