Have you never worked?
No! I read, I write, I watch movies, theater, concerts...
Never never?
I write because I don't even know how to tie my shoelaces. I worked something in the military. Removing it was progressive.
It was eliminated by a right-wing government.
I prefer social democracy.
I argue.
Democratic socialism has created the freest, most prosperous and egalitarian societies in the world. And of history. Look at Northern Europe...
But we are in the south.
I believe in social democracy with sun and tapas. I have defended it in many articles.
In others he has criticized October 1st.
As a Catalan, I was astonished that my rulers projected the blowing up of the rule of law in Catalonia.
He got scared?
I was stumped, and I wrote it down. I don't know how to shut up. I will never be silent, despite the lynchers.
Why charlatan? By intellectual?
By citizen: opt for an idea and not forget politics in the hands of politicians.
Or by writer?
No, the good novel does not choose: it is ambivalent, it says yes and no at the same time, ironic.
In Catalonia, in the end, the rule of law was not blown up.
Its blasting was classified as attempted. If a politician proposes a divisive referendum, I will oppose it. Silence is complicit.
What does he defend?
The institutions of the democratic State. Infinitely perfectible, they are the best guarantee of democracy. And it is not perfect, since a perfect democracy would be a dictatorship.
Who are your enemies?
The anti-system, which stresses the resistance capacity of democracy.
Don't you respect the yearning for perfection?
I refer to Pascal: “We are a mixture of angel and beast. And when we want to be just angels, we become beasts." Aspiring to absolute purity is always a danger.
The temptation of good, Todorov said...
Pretending to impose here the heavenly paradise only engenders hell. Each one wants to impose his paradise: it is calamitous.
Solution?
The humble democracy: that each one exposes his idea of paradise and opposes it to the others... and everyone to vote.
Is it a lesser evil?
It is very ambitious, it is truly revolutionary. That is the European Union.
The final.
The only reasonable utopia that we Europeans have devised.
What does it consist of?
Very different countries, and which made so much war against each other, are now federating to guarantee freedom and strength.
In reaction to World War II?
Yes, and to the wild nationalism of Hitler. And today those countries, each from their particular culture, share sovereignties.
And Spain is comfortable there.
It is that Spain is federal, too, as a reaction to Franco's savage nationalism. From there the seventeen current autonomous communities are born, quite an achievement that is infinitely perfectible, of course.
Congratulations, then, to Adolfo Suárez?
He knew the plans of the Francoist building and dismantled it. Adolfo Suárez was a traitor: he betrayed his own, the Movement. Like Carrillo to his own. Like Gutiérrez Mellado to the coup military.
The three deputies who did not throw themselves to the ground in Congress on 23-F.
Traitors fascinate me, traitors moved the transition.
Betrayal, transition, transaction.
The Civil War lasted three war years plus the forty that followed... The best thing is that feelings, religious or identity, we leave each one at home.
Are you saying it for the nationalists?
They are feelings that lead us to kill ourselves: let's separate them from politics. When the Catalan independence movement grew, the Spanish nationalism that Vox has conveyed grew reactively.
Do you see there communicating vessels?
Of course: as soon as the identity anger subsides, Vox will disappear. It will be enough for everyone, nationalist or not, to moderate.
What does it mean, for you, to be Catalan?
A particular way of being European.
What does it mean, for you, to be Spanish?
A particular way of being European.
By the way, I have learned that you recently had dinner in Paris with Macron.
Yes, along with Mario Vargas Llosa and Juan Carlos I, whom Emmanuel Macron received with State honors.
Oh. And how did you see the emeritus?
GOOD.
And Don Mario?
Also.
