State of the Nation debate a failure
The President came off better than the Leader of the Opposition but 42% believe that the debate had no winner
For every Catalan who thinks that Quim Torra won the grim general policy debate, there are four who think that no one came out on top, according to a survey from the Generalitat’s Center for Opinion Studies (CEO) . Effectively, with 11.4%, Torra was ahead of the Leader of the Opposition, Inés Arrimadas (6.2), but 42% of the Catalans saw no victor at all.
With regard to individual interventions in the plenary session, most applauded was ERC’s Sergi Sabrià (4.65), followed by Carles Riera (4.48), from the CUP. Torra is third (with 4.24). Although traditionally the president usually gets a better mark than the rest, in his case it is “considerably lower compared to the historical reference” of previous heads of government, in the surveys taken since 2005 when the polls began.
In fact. Torra scored worse than any of his predecessors in the presidency, even worse than Puidgemont in his first foray in font of the chamber. The highest scoring president ever was Artur Mas in 2012 following the Diada demonstration when the process began. In that State of the Nation session, Mas scored 6.45.
The telephone survey was taken from a sample of 800 people, of which only 465 said they were aware of the debate and of those 102 say they voted ERC; 93, JUntsxCat, and 40, the CUP, with 47 for Ciutadans, 46 for the PSC, 31 for the Comúns and 9 for the PP.
There is no correlation, therefore, with the results and parliamentary representation. One observation was that pro-idependence voters were more likely to have followed the debate, which may have conditioned the results. And, judging by the survey, many of them were dissatisfied with the session, and the disputes between ERC and JxCat.