There is still work to be done in choosing the Junts candidate to run for mayor of Barcelona. Lawyer Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas is in the running and says he is in talks with Carles Puigdemont, president of JuntsxCat, to lead the party’s list in next year’s municipal elections. “I am not afraid to go to primaries,” Cuevillas declares, in contrast to the stance taken by Josep Rius, former chief of staff to Puigdemont and the expresident‘s favorite to run for mayor, who announced on Monday that he was stepping down as the lead candidate in the Catalan capital to avoid a confrontation with Jordi Martí Galbis, a disciple of Xavier Trias.
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Josep Rius’s step back, spokesperson for the party and a figure of Puigdemont’s utmost trust, seemed to hand Jordi Martí Galbis the status of mayoral candidate on a silver platter. The former right-hand man of Xavier Trias, Junts’ last candidate in Barcelona, had announced on Friday that his intention to be the lead candidate in Barcelona is firm, even if it means a primary process. In an open letter to the membership, Rius referred to the “announcement made by comrade Jordi Martí” as a decisive factor in reconsidering the advisability of continuing with his candidacy, and justified his decision to step aside as a gesture to avoid “confrontation” and “internal challenge.”
The struggle between Rius and Martí Galbis has been interpreted as an extension of the power struggle between Puigdemont and Trias to place their favored candidate in Barcelona. “You will not find me in a logic of confrontation and internal division,” Rius has argued. Martí Galbis, for his part, denies that primaries imply any risk of confrontation. “Junts has always been the party of the ballot box,” he defends.
Before Rius’s withdrawal, former president Artur Mas, former councilor Joaquim Forn, and businessman Tatxo Benet also declined to be Junts’ mayoral candidates. Despite everything, the struggle within the party to lead the list in Barcelona in next year’s municipal elections does not seem resolved.
Lawyer Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas says he is in talks with Puigdemont to lead the party in the Catalan capital. “I have a little thorn stuck and of course I am available. It would excite me and I think I could do a good job,” he says. By “thorn” he refers to the frustration he says he still holds because Puigdemont already offered him to be the mayoral candidate in the 2019 municipal elections. The operation did not materialize then but, according to him, second acts can be good. “My name has been on the table for a long time,” he emphasizes, and assumes that everything is in the hands of the decision Puigdemont ends up making from Belgium. “We are in frequent contact,” he indicates.
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Alonso-Cuevillas no longer legally advises Puigdemont, now Gonzalo Boye does, but he was part of his legal team after the president headed to Belgium in 2017 to avoid being arrested in Spain. Former dean of the Barcelona Bar Association, Cuevillas was a deputy in the Congress of Deputies and also in the Parliament. In February 2024 he stepped back from frontline politics and declared himself “disappointed” by the way parliamentary politics works.
Sources close to Junts involved in the mayoral candidate selection process indicate that the struggle to be the lead candidate is being experienced as “a war” and that it does nothing to help the party’s poor voting expectations. In 2023 Trias won the elections, although he did not govern, with 11 councilors. Some of the polls the party considers predict a collapse to five councilors.
The gradual dissolution of the pro-independence fervor, along with the absent leadership of Carles Puigdemont, who still cannot benefit from the full application of the amnesty, coincides with the emergence of the pro-independence far-right embodied by Aliança Catalana. All this adds difficulties to Junts’ preparatory process ahead of the municipal elections and complicates finding a narrative of their own to go out and compete for votes.
JuntsxCat has called for a municipalist day on May 30 in Vilafranca del Penedès with the aim of outlining and agreeing on the campaign strategy for next year’s local elections. The idea of secretary general Jordi Turull was to use the Vilafranca meeting to announce the names of the mayoral candidates of the most important municipalities. The party won more than 300 mayoralties in the 2023 local elections, there are 947 municipalities in Catalonia, but it does not govern in any of the four capitals. Former councilors Gemma Geis and Violant Cervera have secured the number 1 spot on the list in Girona and Lleida, respectively, but the game remains open in Tarragona and, above all, has become tangled in Barcelona.
