Sovereignty sweats. cold sweating Of which the body itself uses to defend itself from a danger when it notices it. The ghost of abstention terrifies. The movement sensor beacons of the independence movement detect a serious risk of withdrawal by their electorate before the electoral appointment of 23-J. A double-profile absenteeism from the ballot box. On the one hand, the independentistas from pit i collons, who consider ERC, JxCat and the CUP cowards clinging to the chairs and payrolls of autonomy. On the other, the sovereignists who already digested the naked reality of failure a long time ago and who now live almost as an insult that they continue to be teased based on absurd bravado and impossible promises seasoned with ambiguous speeches. Different profiles, contrary motivations. Those who ask for war and those who know that they have already lost it. Some by default, others by excess. But fear that both share the same decision: book a table at the beach bar on election day. Let auntie Mercè go to vote. And a cover that we save!
In the republican and junteros barracks, the bugle player who knows the notes of the call is sought. The overacting of what happened in the Barcelona City Council is part of this attempt. Both Ernest Maragall, now a candidate for the Senate and repeating over and over again that Jaume Collboni is mayor thanks to a covert 155, and Xavier Trias, liking himself in repeated verbal excess at the risk of ending up caricatured, are going in that direction.
Anger and frustration is understandable. But if there has not been something on this occasion, it is a State operation to steal the mayoralty from sovereignty. This time the thing is explained by much more mundane issues, understandable even for a high school student with zero reading comprehension skills. Collboni needed to be mayor at any cost so as not to end up early retired as a bank worker and the commoners did not want to return to institutional destitution. And the PP received a small campaign gift with the movement of Ada Colau temporarily fictionalizing the passage of their own to the opposition. Now Feijóo can already explain in all the bullrings that his party is the antidote to the little that remains of 15-M and secessionism. This is all the wax that burns in this tale. It tastes bad to thwart a good story. But the most that the State has done with the Barcelona mayor’s office is yawn. And not from hunger, from boredom.
For a moment, sovereignism has seen Barcelona as an effective antidote to that frightening abstentionist environment. A light among so much gloom. This is the message for the parish to wake up: “You have already seen that the enemy does not rest, so vote, the country needs you. In return, we promise to be good and never goug each other’s eyes out again”, as the wise patricians Trias and Maragall have taught us, embracing each other like blood brothers. Rufián, generous, already asks for the vote not for him, but for any party with a star. Aragonès proposes agreeing on the price of Sánchez’s investiture with the rest of the pro-independence forces. JxCat promises confrontation to get people off the couch. You have to prick the nerve of the voter. It’s just that this brave little bull in love with the moon that was the independence movement already has so many flags of his own and those of others nailed to his back that there is no way to make him charge again.
The bills are paid. In cash or in installments. The fear of abstention, and the explicit campaigns promoting it that can be seen in some pro-sovereignty circles, are nothing more than expired bills not paid in their day by the still big bosses of the estelada: Junqueras and Puigdemont. Both have already been humanized. Emotional blackmail for your present or past, exile or jail, no longer works. The voter must be seduced with understandable proposals for the future. And on that tomorrow, sovereignty is hardly credible. For some soft and treacherous, for others crazy and fanciful. The fear of the strategists arises from the possibility that they all coincide on 23-J on the terrace of the beach bar: some asking for fideuà, others arrossejat.
