A centrist pitch in La Garriga

Míriam Nogueras, Junts' candidate for Congress and the party's spokesperson in the chamber during the previous legislature, was officially proclaimed candidate for Barcelona at the party's National Council in La Garriga (Barcelona) on Saturday, 17 October. She said Junts has shown it can curb what she called the 'two Spanish blocs', which she believes are increasingly conditioned by the extremes. Her speech framed the 29 November general election as a choice over how much capacity Catalonia has to defend itself, stop the extremes and make Madrid work for Catalonia. Sources describe the gathering as the start of a brief pre-campaign, with the election 43 days away. She condensed the pitch into one line:

“Today the most revolutionary thing is to be in the middle, to defend centrality, to defend rigour and to defend work done well.”

Housing decrees and the snap election

Nogueras defended Junts' decision to vote against two housing decree-laws that the government approved in September. Their failure led Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to call an early general election, and she argued that backing them would have made the country worse off. ABC reports that Junts' seven deputies in Congress took the vote despite the political risk, and Nogueras presented it as a matter of responsibility. She put the argument plainly:

“It was the right thing to do. Voting 'yes' would have meant waking up the next day in a worse country.”

The party's timeline runs from the September decrees to the candidacy proclaimed on 17 October and the 29 November vote.

Attacks on the Govern and Madrid

Nogueras said Catalonia should stop absorbing the 'very bad decisions' taken in Madrid, and argued that the Catalan middle class cannot pay for everything. She described the Sánchez government as irresponsible and said Junts was the only group that had the courage to tell the truth on housing. She also criticized Catalan president Salvador Illa and the Govern, accusing them of acting as a 'flower vase' for the PSOE and of being unable to defend Catalan citizens. In her account, Junts stopped what she called the 'ruin of the Spanish left' and the 'black-and-white country' that she attributed to the Spanish right. Her central warning was:

“What is at stake is whether we stay trapped in the noise of the two Spanish blocs, more and more trapped by the extremes.”

Candidate lists for 29-N

The National Council approved the final candidate lists for the 29 November election. Nogueras heads the Barcelona list, while Josep Maria Cruset leads in Tarragona, Marta Madrenas in Girona and Isidre Gavin in Lleida. The Senate lists include Josep Maria Vila d'Abadal, Anna Cols and Oriol Izquierdo for Barcelona, according to the report. La Vanguardia says Carles Puigdemont addressed the meeting behind closed doors by remote means and also backed the centrality message.