Since I wrote this yesterday it’s become clear that even if Sánchez didn’t encourage the early election in Catalonia he certainly assented to it. He has allies on both side of the Hard Rock controversy and could have chosen to lean on one of them to cede so as to allow the Catalan budget to pass. That he didn’t suggests that he’s relaxed about the May election. Thus the catastrophist framing in this FT story is arrant nonsense.
There’s a couple of notable howlers in the story too: Puigdemont is the capital figure in Junts but he’s not the leader (that’s Jordi Turull), indeed he has no formal post in the party at all. And the PSC is an independent political party which works with the PSOE at the national level in Madrid. It’s the PSOE’s sister party, it’s not a regional branch of it.
Maybe Twitter and Tiktok aren’t the only ones polluting the information space. Maybe prestigious legacy media could be a bit more careful about what they publish.
Estefanía Molina (if you’re not following her, you should be) has more analysis of the politics of the election here. Tldr: the party really inconvenienced by the decision to call an early one is not the PSOE or the PSC, it’s Junts.
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Housekeeping: in a bid to grow my number of subscribers I’m going to make all new texts free to read for a while. I’m very grateful to my paying subscribers and trust they understand this decision. If you’re a free subscriber and you find what I do of value I urge you to encourage me to keep writing by becoming a paid subscriber.
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