If they gave me a euro every time someone asks me if it is possible for “Convergència to come back”, I would already have a small fortune. The last time, three weeks ago, was at a lunch with people from the business world. The reflection that precedes the question tends to always be posed in the following terms: “some of us miss that style that served to make progress…”. I usually answer: “Yesterday’s world will not return, don’t think about it anymore”.
The consultation on continuity in the Government, which the pragmatists of Junts lost, puts on the table the legacy of the former convergents and the possibility of making a new version of the party founded by Jordi Pujol, Miquel Roca and others in 1974. a kind of ghost that, naturally, has been mythologized from nostalgia. Seen from today, some consider Convergència “that obscure object of desire”, if I may use the title of Buñuel’s latest film.
First of all, a game is confused with a time. The world that makes possible the growth of Convergència and the long government period of CiU has disappeared. The social landscape where Pujol’s political proposal was electorally preponderant (never hegemonic) has been completely transformed. Just do a test: compare how and what the children of those most faithful converging voters think during the 1980s and 1990s. In terms of values, interests and priorities, we speak of different parishes, although they may coincide in estimating the possibility, the institutional sense and the defense of some Catalan consensus.
Secondly, a particularly relevant fact is not taken into account: the procés moves the ideological axis to the left, in such a way that the Catalan center-right is reduced and/or becomes less visible. In programmatic terms, Junts and the PDECat seem to be more to the left than Convergència, although later, when it comes to promoting and voting on policies, this should be nuanced on a case-by-case basis. Debates like the one on tax cuts create the mirage – ephemeral – of a convergent revival to the liking of orphaned voters.
Thirdly, the lack of strong leadership suffered by a space where the figure of Pujol did not allow any comparable leader to succeed him is not addressed in depth, a deficit that raises second-rate names to high responsibilities. And, fourthly, we must consider the erosion produced on the convergent imaginary by cases linked to corruption in the past, an extreme that coexists with the vindication of the work of Pujolism.
Regarding the space left by the CDC, Minister Campuzano said yesterday that “the inability of those who are called upon to occupy it makes it easier for others to make it their own.” Without denying this, another reality seems more important to me: that political space is already another space, in a profound sociological and cultural sense.
