Rajoy Hopes to Return Catalonia to ‘Normality’ With an Abnormal Election
They were convened by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain to defeat a secessionist drive by Mr. Puigdemont
and other separatist officials and to return the restive region to what the Spanish leader called "normality." "These are absolutely abnormal conditions" for an election campaign, Mr. Puigdemont said in an interview in Brussels, the Belgian capital.
Still, Mr. Puigdemont wants to convince voters, he said,
that "if the unionists win, Rajoy wins." Opinion polls show Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party heading for a major defeat on Dec. 21, even as another anti-independence party, Ciudadanos, is expected to make major gains.
After the coming vote, Mr. Rajoy said during a visit to Catalonia last Wednesday, "I would like a situation of normality
and tranquillity." The independence movement, he added, "has been the story of an enormous deceit." While Mr. Puigdemont is campaigning from Belgium, his former deputy and separatist rival, Oriol Junqueras, is running for office from a prison in Madrid, where he has been held while awaiting trial on charges of rebellion.
Mr. Rajoy is calling on Catalan voters to defeat Mr. Puigdemont and the other separatist politicians who have governed Catalonia since 2015
but have threatened to break up Spain by holding an illegal independence referendum on Oct. 1.
Mr. Puigdemont said that The parties are not even addressing all Catalans, neither on the one side, nor on the other.
Jaime Pastor said that If the Popular Party really loses all its voters to the
benefit of Ciudadanos, there could be a knock-on impact at the national level,
He cited as an example a recent program about him on Spain’s national television, which used the soundtrack of "The Exorcist," the 1973 movie about a possessed girl, to link his personality "to something almost diabolical." Speaking before the Senate, the president of Spain’s national broadcaster, RTVE, defended the use of the music, which, he described as "very good"
and said was chosen without any "bad intention" toward Mr. Puigdemont.
