Attention, Moncloa; attention, Genoa; attention, Z arzuela: the dinosaur is still there. Mr. Sánchez repeats that the situation in Catalonia is much better than in 2017, there is no fire in Barcelona, ??but Puigdemont wants the State to let him repeat the unilateral path to independence. Attention, magistrates who inaugurated the judicial year yesterday with pomp and disdain: you will have seen the rush and the progressive enthusiasm to make an amnesty law that in some way disauthorizes what you have sentenced in the courts. And attention, public opinion: the Constitution is about to turn 45 years old. It gave us a multitude of rights and freedoms, it gave us the recognition of nationalities, but it was insufficient to solve what already seems like an eternal territorial problem in this country.
And this problem arises so that the first opportunity presents itself. 2023 is, as always, the investiture of the President of the Spanish Government. I say “as always” because most of the concessions to nationalisms, now independenceisms, were made as payment for their parliamentary support. The advances towards self-government were never the result of a program voted in ballot boxes or of a federal or near-federal conception of the State, but of the pressure of these minorities, as if the support for the successive candidates were bought at an auction. This is perhaps the most negative thing about the process: no one managed to draw a model of an autonomous state, everything was built under pressure and, therefore, due to the need of a person or a party. Perhaps we lacked a designer statesman and certainly lacked a sense of Spanish community, and surely there was also left over partisanship and what in the United States they call “ethno-nationalism”.
What is happening these days is the result of these deficiencies and excesses, the independenceist taking advantage of an unrepeatable moment and the electoral needs of the parties. We add that, at the same time as the progressive bloc is being rebuilt, the right-wing is uniting even more, the PP concedes to Vox in Murcia, Feijóo and Abascal talk, are photographed together and, to everyone’s surprise, the leader of Vox is ready to give support for a PSOE-PP coalition to avoid independent power. The territorial question thus becomes one more factor, and the most sensitive one, to aggravate the politics of blocs. We’ll see if it’s the biggest obstacle to reaching the State pact invoked by Puigdemont, Urkullu suggests in the form of a “constitutional convention” and Feijóo claims.
What’s worse, perhaps, is that this blogging policy is moving into society and is perceptible in private conversations. More and more dry and intolerant tones are heard. Those opinions that identify dialogue with Junts or Puigdemont with complacency or humiliation of the State are disappearing. Every day the testimonies against Yolanda Díaz for having “legitimized” a fugitive from justice, no matter how much her spokesperson Marta Lois says that “Sumar is an autonomous political force that has its agenda, its program and its way of acting”. And every day there are or seem to be more people who are shocked that the future of the Spanish Government and the nation depends on the impositions of the tenant of Waterloo.
In appearance, the positions are irreconcilable, although the voices that support dialogue are beginning to be numerous, now that so many are asking for it and expressions such as “historic pact” or “historic opportunity” are being used again. There is no doubt that this opportunity is there, but we will have to see who makes the most of it: Puigdemont, with a boldness that does not correspond to the representative weakness of his party – few deputies, but enough to invest a president -, or Pedro Sánchez, the whose credibility is in decline, because he failed to overcome the image of attachment to power and doing whatever it takes to keep it. And there is always an Alsina who finds a file that shows that today he can say the opposite of what he said a year ago. Or a month
Moments of maximum intrigue. I take it for granted that there will be an amnesty law, which is why whoever made the law cheats. I don’t quite see how the illegal referendum of 1-O is legitimized. It would be a miracle if what was unconstitutional a few days ago magically became constitutional. And I do not rule out that it is necessary to repeat elections. I think that the final decision will not be Sánchez’s or Puigdemont’s: it will be Mr. Tezanos’s and whatever the CIS says. In Moncloa and Waterloo there is a conviction: no repeat elections for Feijóo to win.
