Alternative history is nothing more than a hobby, an excuse for board games or a plot for science fiction. Something like what was suggested by the old counterfactual joke in which a emaciated doctor told a woman with a devastated expression: “Mrs. Hitler: I'm sorry, but little Adolfito won't make it through tonight.” That is why Nietzsche observed that the question “what would have happened if…?” It turns everything into an object of irony.
But who hasn't asked themselves things like that? If England had decided not to participate in World War II, would the Germans have conquered Moscow? If Lenin had lasted twenty years longer, would the crimes of Stalinism never have occurred? James Joyce wrote in Ulysses that the things that have happened cannot be suppressed with thought (“Time has marked them and, chained, they reside in the space of the infinite possibilities that they have dislodged”), which does not take away one bit of intrigue to speculation.
The politics of these days facilitate these ramblings, even though for those who seek to analyze the present what matters is what happened, not what could have been. However, I do not think that anyone who thinks that, without the fierce crisis of 2008 and the social cuts, it was unlikely that the independence passions of a part of Catalans would be exacerbated in such a way, can be called frivolous. Nor to anyone who senses that if the Constitutional ruling had left the Statute as it came out of Parliament, the disaffection towards Spain would have been expressed with greater weight.
I will no longer tell you if a government that demonstrated in this matter the competence of a gang of potato smugglers had not decided to send the police (later leaving them at the horses' feet) to generate a scandal of embarrassing dimensions on October 1 . Would we still be glossing the tweet of Rufián's 155 coins, or would Puigdemont wander around removing the leaves of the daisy of independence through the corridors of the Palau de la Generalitat to the boredom of locals and strangers? And if the Supreme Court had acquitted the pro-independence politicians of the bizarre accusation of sedition and had settled for an effective and modest sentence for disobedience. Would the levels of tension of October 2019 have been reached? Would the prestige of the Spanish courts in Europe have been called into question so frequently? Let's go find out!
History only shows that what happened happened when it had to happen, but that does not make absurd the conjecture that Vox would not have reached Congress without the process, nor that it was the process that made Spanish nationalism rise like no other. He remembered from the times of Sagunto, Numancia and the Second of May.
Nor that, with a government more willing to take political action than to throw the Penal Code at the adversary's head, things could have been very different. Perhaps the winner of the hyperbole contest about the unity of the country (Ciudadanos) would still exist and the PP would not be captive of the extreme right and with no other option to come to power than an unlikely absolute majority.
Because you can say what you want about Sánchez, but if someone had a better plan for Catalonia, they were careful not to explain it, even if it was to speculate on a hypothesis. Unless you want to call it a plan to do nothing or to continue with a judicial offensive with more holes than a sieve, which amazed more than a hundred professors of Criminal Law and several courts around the world, and which is still going strong. .
It is true that we do not know where the Sanchista tactic will take us, but it is evident where the other one led: a not very comfortable place, except for the Asian merchants who made a killing selling Spanish flags and estelades.
Perhaps everything would have been different without dialogue with the independentists, pardons and amnesty, but history offers enough data to suggest that there were few reasonable alternatives that would redirect the situation in convenient terms even, in the not so distant future, for the PP. Although it must be in spite of those patriots on one side or the other of the Ebro who fill their mouths with national honor and act like that thug Marcial Lafuente Estefanía who entered a saloon in the West, looked at everyone out of the corner of his eye and mumbled challenger: “It smells like a coward here.”
