Everything returns, although history never repeats itself. He returns in the contradictions of Junts, the insecurities of ERC, the ups and downs of the CUP and the loops of the Catalan National Assembly. If the history of Catalanism (from regionalism to the current independence movement) is analyzed as a dissident movement of the power bloc in the State, it is verified that, since the end of the 19th century, its fate is linked to an insurmountable contradiction that other movements do not have. contemporaries: it aspires to reform Spain, but its driving force is the memory of a Catalan quasi-sovereignty in a pre-modern confederal framework or the desire for an emancipation of Hungarian, Czech, Irish or Cuban inspiration. The thing was well summed up in 1918 in a sentence from Alcalá-Zamora to Francesc Cambó, leader of the Lliga: “You must choose between being the Bolívar of Catalonia or the Bismarck of Spain, but it is impossible for you to want to be both at the same time. Same time".
Later, Francesc Macià tried to be Bolívar and failed. Jordi Pujol, who reads history well so as not to repeat mistakes, modernizes Catalanism, but avoids the culture of separatism, although in Convergència there were always people who defined themselves as independentists. Pujol never considered secession, it was not his paradigm nor was there then a demand in this regard. When the independence movement began to grow discreetly, starting in the 1990s and the refoundation of the ERC, Pujolismo still had the button that regulated the reactions of the middle classes who voted for "those who defend what is ours." All this jumps through the air after the great economic crisis of 2008 and the ruling of the Constitutional Court against the Statute of 2006.
But let's rewind a bit. We are in 1988. Pujolismo is experiencing its golden age, which will end in 1995, when Pujol loses the absolute majority, a year before González's "sweet defeat" leads CiU to become Aznar's preferred partner, with the pact of the Majestic. Pujol had achieved the second absolute majority of him that year, nothing overshadowed him. The sociovergència was working at full speed. In that context, the magazine La Nació interviews Raimon Galí, Pujol's spiritual father, from whom the president distances himself ideologically when he takes the plunge into politics, because he is more comfortable with the ideas of Jaume Vicens Vives (Gali's colleague and teacher). ) and Pierre Vilar.
Galí, son of the pedagogue Alexandre Galí, was an officer in the army of the Republic and went into exile in Mexico. An active contributor to the magazine Quaderns de l'Exili (directed by Joan Sales and Lluís Ferran de Pol), he returned to Catalonia in 1948. Catholic, reader of Péguy and contrary to Marxism, he questions some of the theses of Vicens Vives. He explains it in this interview, signed by Assumpció Maresma: "The pactism at all costs, which means putting pactism before the feeling of the dignity of the homeland, is the great mistake, which is linked to Catalan decadence." The veteran ideologue adds that “in the years of transition, almost all Catalan politicians, Pujol was no exception, they let themselves be carried away by the pactist side, they accepted a Constitution, which, in its preamble, is unacceptable to the Catalans. We could have presented a battle, we could have lost it, but if we had presented it, I assure you that this 'reduced' Statute that we have now would have been broader. Sure. The Castilians were sufficiently touched by their errors to give in to things that they have not done so afterwards; and we, in this case, failed and did not put forward the thesis of national dignity”.
Does it ring a bell? Impossible not to see in Galí's words an echo of the procés, even in the lexicon. Dignity is the word that has been repeated the most in the demonstrations since 2012. But Galí – who died in 2005 – does not inspire the leaders of October 2017, most have not read it. Galí is not a popular icon like Xirinacs was, but he is also a loser of the transition. What Galí formulated resurfaces when disaffection gives way to a frontal challenge to the autonomous framework and Artur Mas advances the 2012 elections, after Rajoy confirms that the pact (fiscal) has no landing strip. But Galí's revenge cannot be complete: the old combatant did not count on Pujol's confession of July 25, 2014, when the president admitted that his family had "an irregular inheritance abroad."
