Meritxell Batet, who announced this week that she is leaving active politics, said in her first speech as president of Congress in 2019: “Deputies are the plural and diverse expression of a plural and diverse society. None of us individually, nor any of our parties alone, exclusively represents Spain, nor any of its territories, nor the will of all citizens. Each of us is from the people, but no one is the people. Always and everywhere there is someone else, legitimate and different, whom we can only ask to respect the law”.
In politics, there is a tendency to attribute the representation of the entirety of a country, of the entire nation. It happened to Carles Puigdemont in the speech at the hotel in Brussels, where he set out the conditions for investing Pedro Sánchez. We replaced I. It was forgotten that the PSC won the parliamentary elections and that the Catalan Socialists obtained 750,000 more votes than Junts in the last general elections. Nor did he come up with a strategy with ERC – the other major pro-independence force – which has also outplayed them in recent contests.
Puigdemont spoke on behalf of the people of Catalonia in the Belgian capital and of a possible historic agreement with Spain (the PSOE and Sumar do not have the exclusive either). The man from Waterloo knows he has the red button to blow up this legislature, forgetting that he will be the first to fly out the window. And possibly his party. It cannot be denied that he has a privileged position after six years expatriate and for some even forgotten. But his fight with the left is a clear case of the prisoner’s dilemma: the only way out is to make an agreement.
It was Salvador Illa, leader of the PSC, who stopped biting his lip to say publicly that Puigdemont should not speak on behalf of Catalonia and that the Spanish Government can be generous if Junts exercises prudence. Santi Vila has written it in his latest book: nothing is as immoral as the encouragement of identity politics that claim to speak on our behalf. So you have to roll up your sleeves, don’t use the plural and be a possibilist.
