• Public opinion against Catalan Parlament’s fast-track independence roadmap
• Artur Mas’s CDC party falls to fourth place, behind ERC, Ciudadanos, PSC-PSOE
In what has been described as a “tectonic shift” in Catalan public opinion since a September vote interpreted by Catalonia’s leading parties as a pro-independence mandate, just 21 percent of Catalans responding to a new survey say they favor the fast-track roadmap proposed by the Catalan parliament that would see the region gain independence from Spain in June 2017.
In the same survey by the GESOP polling organization published in the Barcelona daily El Periódico, 36% of those surveyed said that Catalonia should “forget about” secession, 34% said they favored a referendum vote negotiated with the government in Madrid, and 50.7 percent said they were not in favor of Catalonia’s Parlament defying the Spanish government or the country’s Constitutional Tribunal in their efforts to achieve independence.
At the same time, the survey revealed that if September’s parliamentary elections in Catalonia were to be held today, the CDC party of former Catalan President Artur Mas would be trounced by its pro-independence partner, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, or Catalan Republican Left), slipping into fourth place in the polls behind ERC, the centre-right Ciudadanos party and the Catalan Socialist party (PSC-PSOE).
► Read More in Spanish at and La Vanguardia …
