It was not possible, everyone has written it. Following the death of Josep Piqué, we have put on the table the failure of trying to catalanize, moderate and focus the Spanish right to make it more similar to the European democratic right. Thinking about it, I have remembered that with my friend Xavier Cambra – who worked closely with Piqué in 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 the first Aznar's cabinet, in 1996.
Why didn't piquerismo take hold? Why didn't the PP allow Piqué to do the task that Aznar seemed to have entrusted to him when he asked him to take the reins of training in Catalonia, at the end of 2002, while he was Minister of Science and Technology? The brief summer of piquerismo 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 groups, in the case of the (Gaullist) republicans in France, come from the anti-fascist tradition and the fight against Hitler, the PP comes from the Popular Alliance, a formation promoted by senior officials of the Francoism.
Although, later, the PP incorporated many people from the UCD and the Christian Democrat or Liberal camp without any link to the authoritarian past, the roots are what they are. The difficulties with which the PP relates to collective memory are a symptom.
Secondly, Piqué was always a strange figure in the PP of Catalonia from an organic point of view. The Vilanovés was never considered "one of ours", he was perceived as a sudden, with difficulties to keep an organization well cohesive 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 Ciudadanos criticized Piqué, in a very bitter way, 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 that he knew little about.
Thirdly, Piqué sought freedom of action to promote his project that Mariano Rajoy's team, with Acebes and Zaplana cutting the cod, did not give him. Despite his prestige and his loyalty to the PP, despite having written a political paper that adapted Habermas's "constitutional patriotism" to the usual centralist mania, Piqué stumbled upon an old familiar scent: branchism. . He was well aware of it, but he must have thought he could stop it.
He made reference to the matter 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." This is how she formulated her objective: “The normalization and guaranteed presence of the PP in the Catalan political center”. She understood that the popular Catalans lived an abnormal situation and far from centrality. So much sincerity was indigestible – even offensive – for many of his co-religionists.
Piquerismo was an illusion more than anything. 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 concòrdia, Cambó identifies "the assimilationist policy on the part of Spain" as a problem, which feeds "separatist sentiment." In a response to Sen, Piqué explained that "Spain can only be built if it joins Catalonia" and warns: "Not if it assimilates." The verb chosen by Piqué was not by chance.
Cambó did not accept the presidency of the Government in 1922 because he did not want to assume the condition that Alfonso XIII placed on him, which was to stop acting like a Catalan politician. Many decades later, the failure of the Roca operation, in the 1986 general elections, 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 attempt. The Spanish right continues today in the hands of the expulsionists, to put it like Gaziel.
