An endemic disease of the independence movement, and therefore of our party system, are the opportunistic attacks of historical significance and unbribable maximalism that promise quick, simple and definitive solutions to complex problems that we have been dragging on for centuries, such as our territorial framework.
I now hear a spokesperson for Junts warn that “the amnesty and the referendum are going to be like the ‘good days’ before starting to negotiate the investiture” and, from the other side of the negotiation, he corresponds by taking flight with candid lightness promises of saving pacts and historic reunions.
Meanwhile, in the street the transcendences of the tribunes are ignored; The demonstrations are emptied and the beaches of this endless summer are carelessly filled.
Those who demand large referendums that change the borders of the EU could now begin to win the daily referendum that is democracy by improving hospitals and schools to which the trains arrive on time. If they achieved this efficiency, the Catalans would give them majorities, election after election, unequivocally and sustained over time. Demanding referendums, however, before earning those votes is throwing jingoistic smokescreens over his personal incompetence.
But managing the parish is more difficult than promising heaven and requires discreet compromises and resignations. You have to put up with the neighbor and his dog, because he, in return, puts up with your son’s screams: he requires Ortega-like involvement, because then you have to agree to paint the staircase. Or we will all live without speaking to each other in a pigsty. It is resigning – like the Flemish and Walloon Belgians who share a State – to the fact that the solution to traffic jams is not unattainable helicopters to an unrealizable utopia, but shared and well-managed highways.
We should be talking about this management of the next, complex and real thing now. Instead, we agonizingly rethink the foundations of the rule of law every time a close election leaves Parliament hanging. And so we are on our way to repeating the third in seven years.