Catalan president calls on defending rights and freedoms at Spanish election

The Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, called on all residents with the right to vote at the Spanish elections on July 23 to defend Catalonia's rights and freedoms against the "reactionary wave" that would mean if the far-right Vox enters the cabinet.

"Catalonia will be the first group defending all the consensus we have achieved," he told media journalists after an extraordinary cabinet meeting in Barcelona on Friday morning.

"I have asked all ministers to focus all their efforts to increase the number of rights Catalans enjoy," he added during a press conference to mark the equator of his four years term.

The cabinet is enjoying a time of "cohesion," as Aragonès said when answered if the former junior coalition partner and pro-independence Junts party would return to the government after leaving in October 2022.

Since then, Esquerra Republicana has been solo governing the cabinet, the first time the group lead the executive alone since the 1930s.

Aragonès believed that the rights and freedoms of Catalan residents are "heavily threatened" because of the far-right and right-wing parties and that the government is now preparing "to continue ahead with its governmental project."

"Considering the risks of setbacks, we will strongly act. Considering the risk of exclusive ideas, xenophobes, and racist positions that fight language and culture, we will stay strong in defending Catalonia as a territory of freedoms," Pere Aragonès said.

Regarding the debate confronting Catalan pro-independence parties on their plan for backing a potential Spanish PM bid by Socialist Pedro Sánchez, Aragonès did not consider a coalition to be of that importance.

"We have to focus on the essence of things; the way and the actions are accessories," he told journalists on the first day of the campaign ahead of the Spanish election on July 23.