Alternate history is still a pastime, an excuse for board games, or an argument for science fiction. A bit like what the old counterfactual joke suggested in which a long-faced doctor said to a woman with a forlorn expression: "Mrs. Hitler: I'm sorry, but little Adolf is not going to make it through tonight." That is why Nietzsche observed that the question "what would have happened if...?" turns everything into an object of irony.
But who hasn't wondered such things? If England had decided not to participate in World War II, would the Germans have conquered Moscow? If Lenin had lasted twenty more years, 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 they have dislodged"), which does not remove a hint of intrigue to speculation.
The politics of these days facilitate these digressions, however much for those who try to analyze the present what is worth is what happened, not what could have been. However, I don't think it can be called frivolous in my opinion that, without the fierce crisis of 2008 and the social cuts, it was unlikely that the pro-independence passions of a part of the Catalans would have been exacerbated in such a way. Nor does anyone intuit that if the Constitutional Court ruling had left the Statute as it came out of Parliament, the disaffection towards Spain would have manifested itself with more weight.
I can't tell you if a government that demonstrated in this matter the competence of a band of potato smugglers had not decided to send the police (and then leave them between the horses' legs) to create a scandal of embarrassing proportions on October 1 Would we still be glossing over the tweet of Rufián's 155 coins, or would Puigdemont wander plucking the daisy of independence through the corridors of the Palau de la Generalitat in the face of the tedium of friends and strangers? And if the Supreme Court had acquitted the pro-independence politicians of the outlandish accusation of sedition and settled for an effective and modest sentence for disobedience. Would the levels of tension have been reached in October 2019? Would the prestige of the Spanish courts in Europe have been called into question so often? Go find out!
History only shows that what happened happened when it had to happen, but that does not make the conjecture that Vox would not have reached Congress without the process absurd, nor that it was the process that made Spanish nationalism cringe as it is not he remembered from the times of Sagunto, Numancia and the Two of May.
Nor the conjecture that, with a government more willing to take political action than to throw the Criminal Code at the opponent, things could have been very different. Perhaps the winner of the contest of hyperboles about the unity of the homeland (Citizens) would still exist and the PP should not see itself captive to the extreme right and with no other option to come to power than that of an improbable absolute majority.
Because you can say what you want about Sánchez, but if someone had a better plan for Catalonia, it was enough to explain it, even if it was to lucubrate with 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 colander, which surprised more than a hundred professors of Criminal Law and several courts around the world, and that it is still cooking.
It is true that we do not know where the Sanchista tactic will lead us, but it is clear where the other one led: a not very comfortable place, except for the Asian merchants who made August by selling Spanish flags and stars.
Perhaps everything would have been different without dialogue with the pro-independence parties, pardons and amnesty, but history offers enough data to venture that there were few reasonable alternatives that would lead the situation to terms convenient even, in the not-so-distant future, for the PP . Even if it has to be in spite of those patriots on one side and the other of the Ebro who fill their mouths with national honor and act like that pincho of Marcial Lafuente Estefanía who entered a saloon in the Oest, he looked at everyone in the corner of his eye and mumbled defiantly: "It smells like a coward in here."
