Catalan voters cast their ballots in regional election

By Alyssa McMurtry

OVIEDO, Spain (AA) - Voters in the Spanish region of Catalonia will cast on Sunday their ballots in a regional election with national consequences.

Polls suggest the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) will come in first place, taking almost 30% of the vote.

They also suggest that the Catalan separatist parties could lose a majority, as the drive toward independence has died down amid central government concessions such as political amnesty for separatists.

With that, according to surveys, the Catalan Parliament will look a lot like Spain’s after the vote — highly fractured and with no clear majority.

The Catalan parties have not committed to any pacts, so what the government could look like in the coming weeks is hard to predict, even knowing the results.

The election in Catalonia has already had repercussions for Spain as a whole.

As soon as current Catalan President Pere Aragonese called the snap vote, Spain’s progressive minority government gave up hopes of passing a new national budget for 2024.

That’s because the Catalan separatist parties are holding up the progressive government. Amid regional elections, their demands of Madrid were only set to increase.

Carles Puigdemont, the self-exiled former president of Catalonia who fled Spain in 2017, is also warning that his party could stop supporting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government nationally if he does not agree with the Socialist-led government regionally.

Campaigning from France, polls are putting Puigdemont as the second-place candidate. Although he is set to benefit from Spain’s controversial amnesty bill, the legislation still has not passed and he faces serious charges in Spain for his role in 2017’s independence push.

Another novelty in Sunday’s vote is the new far-right Aliança Catalana, which mixes extreme anti-immigrant views with Catalan nationalism. It is expected to win its first regional seats.

The Spanish nationalist far-right party Vox is holding steady compared to the 2021 last election, expected to win around 10 seats of the 135-seat parliament.