Alberto Núñez Feijóo managed to turn the entire political spectrum's heads towards him when he spoke this week about the urgency of finding “a fit” for Catalonia in the Spanish territorial structure. Some of those who turned around did so in stupefaction. A few, the socialists, did so with a glimmer of hope at the possibility of finding a valid interlocutor in the PP, something that President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero never found when he considered that the time had come to enter the second phase of the decentralization and encouraged the statutes of second-generation autonomy, with unfortunate results as far as Catalonia is concerned. And another part, which assumes the State of the autonomies as a lesser evil and longs for recentralization – a good part of the PP and all of Vox – looked at Feijóo as if he had lost his mind. Hence his hasty rectification.
President Pedro Sánchez and his probable partner, Yolanda Díaz, openly talk about reviewing the territorial model in this legislature, but in practice, scratching behind their words, there is little theoretical elaboration on how to address territorial unrest with respect to the possibilities offered by the Constitution and there are no creative proposals on the table, not even for its reform. On the other hand, what the experience of the last 15 years shows is that when the PP talks about opening dialogue on the territorial model it only has two things in mind: deploying the statutes of autonomy to carry out new transfers of powers and reviewing regional financing. to offer more fiscal autonomy – and to a certain extent, narrow the redistributive margin that fiscal balances have between territories.
The duo Mariano Rajoy Soraya Saenz de Santamaría never went beyond there, not even when they tried to open dialogue with Artur Mas, first, and Carles Puigdemont, later. In the case of Vox, there is not much to scratch: in its opinion, the autonomies are a wrong concession and the Constitution should be reformulated to recentralize the country. In substance and form, neither Vox nor PP assume the asymmetric nature of the territorial model established by the constituent, distinguishing between two types of territories, nationalities and regions, with different historical rights and with different models of self-government.
In the orbit of the Spanish right in recent decades, only Miguel Herrero de Miñón, one of the fathers of the Constitution, always maintained a versatile and creative outlook, ready to rethink the model to adjust it to the desires of one and the other, and try to stabilize the political conflict with some solution accepted by all parties.
The PSOE's adherence to federalism, imperfect and fickle, had its most expressive expression in the Granada declaration of 12013, a document titled A new territorial pact: the Spain of all, a commitment to federalism that, instead of relaxing the model , reinforced it by proposing that the current configuration of autonomies be fixed in the Constitution with the name and territory of all of them – something that would bury the claims of the provinces of the old kingdom of León, for example – and that in its development it was a kind of Reinforced state of the autonomies.
In the Sumar universe – the former Unidas Podemos cluster and its confluences – due to its plural composition there is a secular view of the problem – without red lines – and an express recognition of the plurinationality of the State, but models have never been fully developed. or specific offers. There was an attempt, during the procés crisis, to develop a more creative model together with the PSOE, and both exchanged documents, but things never went beyond that.
In summary, to Lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe and his “Free Associated State” – modeled on the relationship model between the United States and the island of Puerto Rico – we owe the only non-18th century or Jacobin novelty in our territorial debate. So if this is the legislature, the party think tanks are going to have to work until they drop.
