Jordi Pujol surprisingly won the first elections to the Parliament of Catalonia, on March 20, 1980, with the active support of Catalan employers. The left had just won the first democratic municipal elections (April 1979). The wave was left-wing in the big cities and in Europe the final phase of the cold war was beginning. Many people took it almost for granted that the first socialist secretary Joan Reventós would be the new president of the Generalitat, once the Statute was approved and the great foreword by Josep Tarradellas concluded, a foreword that was the result of pressure from the streets and the Adolfo Suárez’s tactical audacity.
The employers’ association Fomento del Trabajo Nacional (today Foment) believed that the new government of Catalonia would be a coalition of socialists and communists (Eurocommunists, to be more precise), at a time when there was a union section of Workers’ Commissions in all workshops and factories in the province of Barcelona. The vote of the province of Barcelona had prevented Suárez’s UCD from obtaining an absolute majority in the first democratic elections of June 15, 1977. Three years later, the same province of Barcelona dyed red could give the Generalitat a front of ‘leftists directly connected with the unions. Foment put a thread on the needle to avoid this and succeeded, with the support of the Sefes del Baix Llobregat employer dynamic.
Advertisements in newspapers, radio spots and commercials in cinemas warned against the advent of a Marxist Catalonia. Under the baton of Manuel Milián Mestre, seventy public events were held throughout Catalonia and the newsletter Horizonte Empresarial became an agile polemicist. Carlos Ferrer Salat presided over the CEOE, facing Suárez from the start, whom he labeled a “populist”. Alfredo Molinas chaired Fomento del Trabajo Nacional. Catalonia could become a new Czechoslovakia, that was the message. Paradoxically, at that time, the ambassador of the USSR in Spain, Yuri Dubinin, maneuvered against the Eurocommunist line of the PSUC, which Moscow considered a betrayal. Their main concern was the Italian Communist Party, with 1.7 million members, but they opted for the breakup of the Catalan party (25,000 members) as their first warning. The PSUC obtained 19% of the votes in the elections of March 1980, with the Catholic Josep Benet leading its list as an independent. After a few months, the Party began to break up from within.
Stories from another time. Stories of yesteryears that can offer some clue about the current moment, so different and so distant. It would be wrong to attribute the rise of CiU in 1980 to the Foment campaign, in a mechanical way or under a conspiratorial lens. Political talent was needed to unite the nationalist vote and part of the Catalan vote of the UCD in the first parliamentary elections and Pujol knew how to deploy this talent. CiU was the party with the most votes, with 27.8%, five points more than the PSC, and won in advance the complicity of the nationalist Heribert Barrera, then president of Esquerra Republicana (9%), with the sure support of Centristes de Catalunya, of Anton Cañellas, which dropped to 10%. The Andalusista Party of Alejandro Rojas Marcos also joined the party and scored 2.6%. Quite possibly on the night of March 20, 1980, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra breathed a sigh of relief.
Almost forty-five years have passed and the elections being held today in Catalonia have little to do with those first elections. The past never comes back, but history tends to make some circular motions. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, Mark Twain is said to have said. With the seat belt firmly on and the amnesty almost ready, Carles Puigdemont dreams today of the Jordi Pujol of 1980: winning the elections or aspiring to the presidency of the Generalitat from the second position, forcing the support of ERC .
History progresses forming spirals, said the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who gave great importance to religion and myths. Toynbee considered that nationalism and communism are second-order religions that pay tribute to “collective human power”. The communist party no longer exists in Catalonia, and the Commons, which could be a distant echo of it, have just lost the mayorship of Barcelona. Catalan nationalism can tonight enter a phase of restructuring under the rhetorical layer of independence.
History draws circles and these weeks we have seen Foment in action, without an anti-Marxist campaign. Ten days before the start of the electoral campaign, the Foment board went to the south of France to interview Puigdemont. An unequivocal gesture. That day Salvador Illa, a less naive politician than Joan Reventós, discovered that his pragmatism was not the only bet of Catalan employers. Foment’s gesture drew an aurora borealis on the horizon of the middle classes, concerned about property and inheritance taxes, who do not want a Generalitat governed by left-wing social democrats. All of Europe is moving to the right, and Puigdemont, a major protagonist in recent months thanks to the fury of the Spanish right, offers to channel this impulse, combining it with a perfectly flexible pro-independence rhetoric.
Forty-five years have passed, history draws circles and spirals, and Jordi Pujol, aged 93, closed the campaign on Friday announcing in a video that Convergència has returned.
