Well, everyone’s here and the cards are on the table: Salvador Illa, Pere Aragonès, or Carles Puigdemont will lead the Junts candidacy after announcing on Thursday in Elna, the French town that once safeguarded the ballots from October 1, 2017. If the Catalan elections on May 12 swing his way, Puigdemont says he is ready to return to finish the job and pull Catalonia out of its long pause.
In truth, the lull has some sense to it. The old oasis of Catalonia is stuck in a kind of sleepy, existential fatigue, a consequence of unilateral rupturism that treated the hopes of one half of Catalans with contempt for the other. Beneath the palm shadows, goats are milked and prickly pear thorns are dodged as the drought yawned on. The party ERC now aims to become Convergència again and embrace the pragmatism of the “fish in the basket” approach, a bird in hand sort of thinking. The ballots will speak. And the winding legal path of amnesty will be scrutinized.
The move by Puigdemont signals, once more, that the campaign will likely revolve around symbols and dreamlike paradises rather than addressing tangible problems. Hospitals. Trains. Prisons. Unemployment. Spain’s role in a Europe facing two wars at its doorstep. There is another weight on the mind of many voters: the extreme drought. To grasp the scale of the challenge, one would have to look back two centuries. The neglect of the last decade now forces urgent responses, from planting trees at river sources to expanding desalination capacity.
The campaign is sure to fixate on dramatic visions, but the real test remains: how to balance immediate needs with long-term stability, how to manage water scarcity, how to sustain public services, and how to redefine Spain’s role in a Europe that is evolving rapidly amid uncertain times.
The region’s economy trembles as tourism interests from Lloret de Mar plan a late May initiative to activate more than 150 swimming pool projects in the sector, while Barcelona hotel associations debate a similar push. The sentiment is sharp: energy costs are high, and efforts to fix leaks in the water system have not kept pace with demand. The question lingers—should desalination capacity be ramped up, or should emphasis be placed on water conservation and efficiency first?
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