Politics has to do with consensus, with concessions, with dialogue and with the search for agreed solutions to issues that are insurmountable in principle. Abraham Lincoln said that problems created by men can be solved by men. No one can claim victory in the July 23 elections because no force can govern without the help of one or more partners, with whom they will have to negotiate concessions. The culture of the pact is normal today in European countries as different as Finland, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands or Italy.
The great coalition between socialists and popular is not on the table, although authorized voices insist that it would be a temporary and interim solution to guarantee political stability.
The elections were raised from the confrontation between two blocks with antagonistic visions on social policies and, above all, on the concept of territorial organization of the State. The litigation goes back a long way. Hispanist John Elliott places it in the Habsburgs who, from Felipe II to Carlos II, failed to win the complicity of the old kingdoms and haggled to swear to their constitutions.
The decision of the Count-Duke of Olivares to put an end to the Catalan singularity led to the Guerra dels Segadors of 1640, which cost Olivares his position, but Catalonia lost that confrontation with Spain. The obsession with the unique Spain was one of the causes that led Felipe V, the first Spanish Bourbon, to promulgate the Decree of Nueva Planta, after having defeated what was left of the Austrian armies, which surrendered on September 11, 1714.
Another long period of grievances began that, in many ways and in different stages, have continued until today. Weapons never ended the conflict in Catalonia. And Catalonia has never been victorious in its confrontations with Spain either.
Jaume Vicens Vives draws these two visions that arose within the Bourbon state, driven by the attempts of popular reformism in the 18th century and by the Napoleonic bayonets of 1808. Two solutions were proposed, Vicens says. One “abstract, Jacobin and uniformitarian of the Castilian and Andalusian intellectuals and another, the real, historicist and pluralist of the thinkers of the north, from Catalonia to the Santander mountain”.
History does not repeat itself, but it is good to know it to take into account that these two visions are still present in Spanish political life in these days of debates on the investiture and governability in the mandate that has just been inaugurated.
I have found this dedication that Ernest Lluch wrote in his last book published while he was alive and which is entitled The Catalan alternative: “To my friend Lluís Foix, this book that I have written in homage to some Catalans who defended our constitutions, who could have allowed us an English or Dutch evolution, and not the French, Prussian or Russian, which led them to death or exile, experiencing the problems of a not very large country to the full”.
It was Catalan minds that inspired the arrival of a secular democratic monarchy in 1869, with the arrival of Amadeo de Saboya at the hands of General Prim, and those that introduced the federal republic in 1873. Both contributions were very brief and failed to give way. to the Restoration of Cánovas and Sagasta, which also ended badly in 1923 with the coup of Primo de Rivera announced from the General Captaincy of Barcelona.
Catalonia cannot achieve independence against Spain and without Europe. But Spanish political and social stability will be very fragile without establishing pacts and complicity of all kinds with Catalonia and the Basque Country. The procés parties have lost votes and parliamentary representation as demonstrated by the last two elections.
But parliamentary arithmetic means that the pro-independence seats, more specifically the seven that obey Carles Puigdemont, who directs Junts per Catalunya from Waterloo, are essential to keep the next government alive. There is another way of articulating the plural and complex reality that allows everyone to feel comfortable without losing their cultural identity and obtain greater levels of self-government under the umbrella of Europe.
