Whole bread No frills. This was the goal of independence. Patience with healthcare, dependency, education, infrastructure, taxes and noise from the neighbor upstairs, because everything, and everything was everything, had to be solved with the republic. It was worth gritting your teeth and stoically enduring any penalty because the countdown to the new Catalan State was on and counting seconds to get closer to the redemptive zero.
The days of the degradation of public services and the abuse of taxation endured by Catalans compared to other territories were coming to an end. There was a rush. The culprit of so many evils had been identified: Spain. There was no time to waste. It was enough to get rid of Spain for Eden to bloom around us. Those were good times for the lyric. The verses functioned like simple prayers of the new religion that had arisen in the blink of an eye. Martí and Pol at the time of the awards: everything is to be done and everything is possible. And Ovidi Montllor when the vigils arrive: they no longer feed us the crumbs, we want the whole bread. What came next is well known. After inflating it so much, the balloon ended up bursting on the lips. And poetry became administrative prose.
Six years later, sovereignty negotiates an amnesty that returns the nuclear blank to the service sheet of the leaders of the process and their intermediate commands. A cross and stripe that must also leave the history of good citizens unpolluted by those who, on their own initiative or pushed by their rulers – “press, press, do well to press” – ended up with serious legal problems to bring their protests beyond the limits established by law.
The two main protagonists of 2017, Carles Puigdemont and Oriol Junqueras, keep their respective matches in their hands. Not even the credentials of president of the Generalitat that Pere Aragonès shows are enough to intuit a leadership that is no longer alternative, but at the very least complementary in the case of the Republicans. In Junts the hierarchy is even more pronounced. Only Puigdemont can shadow Puigdemont. The amnesty, it is supposed, will serve to put an end to the mess that the two of them caused. The other side, the PP government that actively participated in the disaster, first with indolence and then with excesses of all kinds, has been at home since 2018. So it is normal that, with the same generals in command, the agenda of sovereignty remains stuck in the same place. The window of opportunity of 2021 was used for pardons and that of 2023 will be used for amnesty. The history of the process, which the amnesty will put an end to if it becomes concrete, is summed up for Catalanism in the reverse version of Churchill’s phrase: never have so few owed so much to so many.
Opportunity cost also exists in politics. You do one thing and stop doing others. That’s why the Government spokesperson, Patrícia Plaja, or the Minister of Economy, Natàlia Mas, can already be seen in the Palace of the Generalitat with reports on the malfunctioning of Rodalies, the non-compliance with the investments planned by Renfe or Adif in the general budgets of the State or the shameful regional financing system. Only citizens who know by heart all the grievances and discomforts that arise from these issues will listen to them. Because the priorities, especially when the real leaders are not in the Government, are demonstrated in the negotiation files at times like the present. And the truth is that these questions do not appear as non-negotiable among those who have the pan by the handle when it comes to deciding the viability of the future government of Spain. The main virtue of the amnesty, from the Catalan point of view, is that it exhausts the fountain of personalized victimhood. Maybe in three or four years we can negotiate again for bread. We know that keeping it whole was a joke, but we would be satisfied if someone seriously claimed some more tender and generous fillings. Someday. With other names.
