Junts and the CUP have given the green light through the Parliament’s Board, coinciding with the monographic plenary session on the drought, to the processing of a popular legislative initiative (ILP) presented by Solidaritat Catalana (it still exists!) so that independence declare itself again unilaterally this same legislature. A DUI from Chichinabo. Against all common and political sense, junteros and cuperos give wind to what is nothing more than a ridiculous and marginal performance arrived at the Parliament from the confines of the most thunderous independence movement.
Little can be said about the CUP, which is currently in the process of reflecting on its present marginality and its future essence through the Gestalt method or similar. Yes, it is convenient to refer to Junts, a party thanks to which Spain has a president and a government and which so enjoys its newly acquired prominence as kingmaker of state politics in exchange for an amnesty that is still being negotiated.
What pushes the junteros to give oxygen to a headless ILP that seeks to recover the undemocratic procedure of 2017 at a time when it is negotiating with the other hand something as sensitive and complicated as the penal oblivion of everything related to the process?
First, the more than likely possibility that the initiative will founder as soon as it looses its moorings, taking into account the ILP regulations that place this particular one on the margins of legality. Second, do not give reasons to the independentists who insist from the Catalan National Assembly for the appearance of a fourth secessionist list by offering them a lollipop with which to entertain themselves. Third, avoid the possibility that the two Junts representatives at the chamber table, Anna Erra, president, and Aurora Madaula, second secretary, would vote differently in the event that the party had opted for abstention. Surely Erra would have followed the party’s guidelines, but who knows what Madaula would have done when she was on the verge of expulsion from her parliamentary group, following in the footsteps of her partner Cristina Casol, who is navigating through space sidereal of the non-attached deputy.
Instead, the formal argument argued has been that in Parliament everything must be able to be talked about and debated. This is a demagogic handle that turns the chamber into a rag to mop the floor under the appearance of democratic radicalism that is actually the opposite. An ILP that claims that half plus one of the deputies is enough to declare independence is as undemocratic now as in 2017. And parliaments are there to deepen democracy, not to trample it in its name.
ERC has been a little more coherent with its abstention. His argument says that he does not want to frustrate the hopes of the independence supporters who remain emotionally anchored seven years ago. It is just another way of stating that having crashed once, they consider the lesson learned for the moment. In their case, this position is easier to maintain since they already discounted the “we’re in a hurry” votes a long time ago. The junteros, on the other hand, as they later rectified, continue to make balances to keep in their pool of voters those who continue to believe that independence is a feasible objective with the same parliamentary mechanisms with which a motion in defense of rights would be approved. to defecate wherever the starling wants. Hence, even-numbered days point to reality and odd-numbered days focus on fantasy.
Since none of this is going to have any practical effect, we could ignore and belittle the decision of the Parliament Board. But there are two considerations that dictate not doing so. The first, that with this type of decisions, Junts increasingly strains the structures of the PSOE and makes the path towards a resolution of the political conflict that goes beyond the de-judicialization already agreed, although pending approval in Congress, extremely difficult. And even more importantly, it feeds, although unlike 2017 it now does so marginally, the most national populist and anti-democratic drive of the independence movement. Meanwhile it is still not raining.
