Salvador Illa carries a couple of clips in his jacket pockets, which he plays with in tense moments to relax. Catalan politics has recently been subjected to so much stress that it is possible that it may have needed a whole supplementary budget in clips to get to the end of the days without altering. But the clips are also a metaphor for how the socialist candidate who won Sunday’s regional elections understands politics, and basically life. His campaign slogan was not patriotic but pragmatic: unite and serve. Pretty much what we use clips for.
Illa has repeated ad nauseam that it is necessary to emphasize what unites us in order to close the scars of the past and take a step forward so that Catalonia can once again be the locomotive it was. The country must be more of a clip of rationality than ever, more supportive of emotions than ever.
Between the discreet, dignified and respectful departure from Catalan politics of Pere Aragonès, acknowledging responsibility for the defeat of ERC, and the uncritical, bold and overbearing speech of Carles Puigdemont there are two ways to accept failure. The defeat has been personal, but also collective for independence, the result of a story and an action that led nowhere but to irrelevance and which has caused fatigue and disillusionment in the sovereignist ranks.
Between these two political poles, the speech of the winner of the elections has been inclusive, moderate and hopeful. A discourse that takes us back to the most transversal Catalanism of the best years of democracy. The journalistic photograph of Salvador Illa and Miquel Roca walking together has been one of the most successful claims of the campaign.
It will not be easy for him to gather support to be president, but he already demonstrated his left hand shortly after October 2017, when he achieved an agreement between socialists and convergents to govern the Diputació de Barcelona. The PSC occupies the centrality of Catalonia and the best news would be that all of Catalonia was located at this wise cardinal point of the political compass. Although Illa will need the six-meter clip listed in the Guinness Book of Records, and is exhibited in Florida, in order to unite so much disenchantment.
