It was not possible, everyone has written it. Following the passing of Josep Piqué, we have put on the table the failure of trying to Catalanize, moderate and center the Spanish right to make it more similar to the European democratic right. Thinking about this, I remembered that with my friend Xavier Cambra – who worked closely with Piqué at the Cercle d’Economia – we coined the term piquerismo to refer to what the Catalan economist and senior executive who was called to form part of Aznar’s first cabinet, in 1996.
Why didn’t pikerism take root? Why did the PP not allow Piqué to do the job that Aznar seemed to have assigned him when he asked him to take the reins of education in Catalonia, at the end of 2002, while he was still Minister of Science and Technology? The short summer of pikerism illuminates the indomitable centralist and uniformitarian impulses of the right.
The answer to the previous questions must be sought, first of all, in the labyrinth of history. There was and is a structural problem that we cannot ignore: while other right-wing parties, let’s take for example the republicans (Gaullists) in France, come from the anti-fascist tradition and the fight against Hitler, the PP comes from the Popular Alliance, a formation that they promoted high officials of Francoism.
While it is true that, subsequently, the PP incorporated many people from the UCD and the democratic or liberal camp without any ties to the authoritarian past, the roots are what they are. The difficulties with which PP relates to collective memory are a symptom.
Secondly, Piqué was always a strange figure within the Partit Popular de Catalunya from an organic point of view. The villain was never considered one of the real gang, he was perceived as an overachiever, with difficulties in keeping an organization well-cohesed with recurring provincial problems. Despite Aznar’s endorsement and the services rendered as minister, he suffered constant suspicions and maneuvers from his predecessors.
I remember a dinner in which some journalists and professors who would become founders of Ciutadans criticized Piqué in front of him, very bitterly, because he was “too soft and tolerant” with Catalan nationalism; the scene revealed the great obstacles of the Catalanist turn that he wanted to introduce in an organization he knew little about.
Thirdly, Piqué sought a freedom of action to promote his project that Mariano Rajoy’s team, with Acebes and Zaplana stirring the cherries, did not give him. Despite his prestige and his loyalty to the PP, despite having written a political paper that adapted Habermas’ “constitutional patriotism” to the usual centralist deria, Piqué ran into an old familiar smell: branchism. He was well aware of it, but he must have thought he could stop him.
He referred to it in a book-interview written by Cristina Sen, published in July 2003: “I anticipate a certain discrepancy between us and the PP in Madrid because they will also want this subordination to Spanish politics”. He formulated his objective as follows: “The normalization and guaranteed presence of the PP in Catalan political centrality”. He understood, therefore, that the popular Catalans lived in an abnormal situation and far from centrality. Such sincerity was indigestible – even offensive – to many of his co-religionists.
Pikerism was more of an illusion than anything else. Piqué knew history and had in mind the adventures of Francesc Cambó, among others. He was aware of the difficulty of his goal. In the book Per la concordia, Cambó identifies “the assimilationist policy on the part of Spain” as a problem, which feeds “the separatist sentiment”. In a response to Sen, Piqué explains that “Spain can only be built if Catalonia is incorporated” and makes a warning: “Not if it assimilates”. The verb chosen by Piqué was no accident.
Cambó did not accept the presidency of the Spanish Government in 1922 because he did not want to accept the condition set by Alfonso XIII, which was to stop acting as a Catalanist politician. Many decades later, the failure of Operation Roca, in the general elections of 1986, confirms that the mentality of the Spanish elites had not changed much in this regard. Piqué’s experiment at the head of the PP of Catalonia was the last test. The Spanish right continues today in the hands of the expulsionists, to say it like Gaziel.
