Catalonia has lived a political decade focused on a single issue. The Catalonia-Spain conflict took any other topic out of the public conversation – and for a year and a half from the private one too, however transcendent and necessary its approach might turn out to be. The logic was childishly simple. Since any evil was attributable to not having a State of its own, all problems would be solved the moment this lack ceased to be so. So it wasn’t worth wasting time on trifles. In turn, for constitutionalism, the only urgent thing was to confront and end this threat by all possible means. So from the opposite motivation, the result ended up being the same: any question that was not related to the flags had to wait indefinitely.
More things happened. In the playing field of sovereignty the centre-right melted. Its ideological articulation disappeared from the scene, ceding all programmatic prominence to the left. The financial crisis, the 3%, the inflated Pujol case, the fear derived from not being independentists of the first flight, all this summation created a complex state of mind that could only be overcome by renouncing the political legacy that gave historical personality to this space. The sovereignist or purely Catalanist social right continued to be represented politically, but only in relation to the independence issue, the only thing that seemed to count at the time.
The consequence was twofold. On the one hand, the aforementioned postponement of many issues that would have posed a threat of distraction in the midst of the secessionist onslaught and its subsequent repression and collapse. On the other, the disappearance of the conservative counterweight in nationalism, making Catalonia one of the territories most tipped to the left of the entire continent, with no alternative discourse to that promoted by self-styled progressivism.
All this must be kept in mind to understand the true extent of the fact that Junts has now decided to play the immigration card politically. And also to decode why the left overacts by accusing them of embracing the far-right discourse, assimilating them to xenophobic positions. The decision of Carles Puigdemont’s party is easily understandable. The public conversation about the particular does not only exist, but is of great intensity. There are political movements, such as Aliança Catalana, encouraging this issue to become the central axis of the public discussion in the run-up to the next elections.
Motion sensors indicate that this concern should be picked up. And given that Junts has been working since its last ideological conclave in 2022 to be something more than an independence movement, rearming itself as a conventional party through an ideology that is also social and economic, it is normal that one of the issues it tries to flag be this one in particular.
With regard to the accusations made by the left against the board members for allegedly whitewashing the ultra-right theses, the truth is that it is a bit embarrassing to exaggerate. But it is explained by how much surprise it causes, it is almost disruptive in the end, that in Catalonia and from the sovereignist spectrum, certain matters are brought up with a different approach after so many years of imposed unanimity due to the withdrawal and disappearance of the center-right nationalist in the axis of social discussion. Wow, the dumb guy was cuter when he didn’t open his mouth.
Catalonia will not manage immigration despite everything that has been said this week. Wednesday’s announcement about the full transfer of powers by the State were fireworks that will go out after painting the sky for a while. But it did serve to clearly observe how a new political framework is taking shape in which, after the independence demands of all the actors are lowered, other issues that have been discussed for a long time on sofas, tables and beds are rapidly gaining weight of the addresses We also saw it with the PISA report, a disaster that had gone virtually unnoticed during the peak moments of the process.
That’s good news. These deferred and silenced issues must be seriously discussed. And it is convenient to do it with all eyes on the table to definitively break the false consensus that impoverishes the hygienic and heated discussion that the most crucial matters deserve. Those who have established the foundations of a new society that mutates at breakneck speed for many reasons, including the permanent arrival of immigrants.
