The Spanish, Catalans included, have innovated little in politics in their contemporary history. In both their democratic and dictatorial phases, they have copied external models and often done it poorly. Even when they achieved a more or less successful operation, the transition – which Ernest Lluch explained in the Balkans in case it served as a model for the former Yugoslav countries – they have not known how to adapt it to the new times.
The Spanish, on the other hand, excel at copying themselves. The “act” that the PP calls for on 9/24 has its roots in demonstrations from a century ago. In December 1918, for example, thousands of citizens protested in the streets of Madrid against the proposal for a statute of autonomy proposed by the Catalan parties, led by the Lliga Regionalista. At the beginning of the 1930s, new acts were called against the approval of the Statute of Catalonia. The Minister of Culture of the Generalitat, Ventura Gassol, even had his romantic poet's hair cut in Madrid.
The secular path of anti-Catalan protests reaches us. Today the PSOE loses the elections, but can govern by articulating majorities with the independence movements and the parties to its left – “the anti-Spain” –. And I would do it for years if the left-wing voter were less picky about their vote. On the other hand, after twenty years on the path of Aznarism, the PP finds itself at a dead end. His split, Vox, pushes him towards extreme politics that scares potential allies. He wins the elections, but cannot govern. Thus it has lost its last partner, the PNV, gripped by the rise of Bildu and hesitant about an eternal reform of the Basque Statute that, seeing the result of the Catalan case, has been in limbo for years.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo has already warned. Hence the contradictory messages from him. But it is difficult to change a policy of two decades in one month with Isabel Díaz Ayuso at the neck. The paterfamilias Aznar has offered him a solution: that the street makes Catalonia boil and, above all, that it makes the PSOE nervous so that it breaks the deck. Not to the socialists who speak in public, who are the usual ones and from a political time gone by, but to the cadres who saw their teeth while an independence movement in electoral decline boasts of its luck and raises the decibels of the amnesty.
Ironically, the balm to calm those who remain silent while they sense a via crucis of the legislature is in Waterloo. In ERC, not because they are less pro-independence, but because they have negotiated for four years, they have taken the pulse of tightening the rope without breaking it, although their electorate has made them pay dearly. Carles Puigdemont has it in his hands to organize the “counteract” to the PP. To do this he will have to overcome tense days (like 9/19), obvious things (that one cannot always pay in advance) and infinite pain (that those who today exalt him as the true president of the Generalitat throw him at the feet of the horses the day after the pact). Oh!
