Jaume Reixach, 21 November 2023
Independentist mayors sing alongside Junqueras, Puigdemont Forcadell and the rest of the politicians ‘Els Segadors’ on the steps of the Parliament / David Airob
They will do it again
He has already done it: Pedro Sánchez has been sworn in as president of the Spanish government and now has four more years ahead of him to exercise his leadership of the state.
To begin with, it will not be easy. In the magma of parties that have supported him there are some that are antithetical (ERC vs. JxCat, PNV vs. Bildu, Sumar vs. Podemos) and this will make it very difficult to achieve the necessary consensus to push through the approval of laws, starting with the Budget for next year.
The coexistence of formations of the transformative left, such as Podemos, Bildu and BNG, with others that are moderate in economic policy, such as JxCat, PNV and Coalición Canaria, will also be difficult to digest. Finding, on a permanent basis, the lowest common denominator among the eight political forces that support Pedro Sánchez’s government will be a very laborious task, heavy and full of headaches.
The approval of the amnesty law for the Catalan pro-independence supporters, whether convicted or indicted, will be a road full of pitfalls and hellish. The frontal opposition to this law, not only in the PP and Vox, but -with solid legal arguments- in all kinds of judicial, academic, professional and social bodies, anticipates that its processing, approval and application will be a minefield.
Pedro Sánchez will have to use the first part of his term of office to fight very hard to ensure that the Budget is approved and that the amnesty law is finally published in the BOE, which, if things go well, will not happen before the summer. We are therefore in for a few months of fierce political debate, with demonstrations in the streets, media tension and heated debates on the social networks.
If the opponents, starting with King Felipe VI, understand that the amnesty is the consequence of the unmitigated defeat of the pro-independence supporters who, in 2017, tried to establish the Catalan republic, perhaps they would look at it with less vehemence and more condescension. In order to ease the atmosphere – which is urgent and necessary – it would also be necessary for those who benefited from this extraordinary measure of grace, starting with Oriol Junqueras and Carles Puigdemont, to address Catalan and Spanish society to publicly apologise for the enormous mess they have organised and for all the damage they have done.
Can one be a Catalan pro-independence person in Spain and within the framework of the European Union? Of course! Everyone is free to have whatever ideology they want and to propagate it, as long as it respects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
However, it should be noted that the whole paraphernalia of the process was a colossal social engineering set-up, greased with a mountain of millions of euros from the public purse and based on a big lie: it is immoral and impossible to impose the secession of a part of a State when there is not an overwhelming social majority in favour of it. And this was not and is not the case of Catalonia, a territory closely related and fused, for centuries – for historical, economic, political, cultural, family reasons… – with the Hispanic peoples as a whole.
The enormous educational and media manipulation orchestrated by the Pujolist regime, to which Catalan society was subjected for many years, did not achieve its purpose of converting the “masses” to the pro-independence doctrine. And this, despite the congenital short-sightedness and inefficiency of the institutions of the Spanish state, which failed miserably to foresee and neutralise the powerful operation that sought to dynamite the bridges that link us to the rest of the peninsula.
Fortunately, the leaders of the pro-independence movement have shown that they were a bunch of pigheads and that they, more than anyone else, knew intimately that the push for independence was a farce or, if you like, a bluff, in the words of the famous Clara Ponsatí. They had neither the capacity, nor the courage, nor the will to carry out what they had been preaching and promising to the four winds, pretending to be arrogant.
For this reason, because they were and are mythomaniacs and ghosts, amnesty is a concept that is too big for them. They are not worthy because the crimes attributed to them do not deserve them. All of them, from the first to the last, were a troupe of comedians who tried, and almost succeeded, in “trolling” the Spanish state.
The problem is that, like sorcerers’ apprentices, the invention got out of hand and, by a very narrow margin, they did not end up provoking a humanitarian disgrace that we would all regret today. In their obsession to continue playing in their “escape room”, the pro-independence leaders have pulled the amnesty mantra out of their sleeves, trying to recall those granted in 1977 or 1936, but obviously it is not the same thing. In the amnesties of 1936 and 1977, deaths, blood, torture, revenge and bombs were pardoned. In the amnesty now demanded by ERC and JxCat there is none of this: it was all a Chinese shadow theatre, animated by the Tsunami “performances”, the nights of the “Patum” of Urquinaona and the Miss Pepis experiments of the CDR.
The worst thing Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Fernández Feijóo can do is to take seriously the amnesty demanded by the pro-independence crew. As with small children, in the end, the best thing to do is to give it to them and keep them quiet for a while. Therefore, it is a mistake to dramatise the amnesty law, because it is just another joke that forms part of the enormous role-playing game in disguise that the “brains” of the pro-independence movement have created, and I take my hat off to them for their great capacity for fabulation and collective hallucination .I do, however, recommend that the powers of the state read very carefully and attentively the book “La matemàtica de la història”, by the Figueres pharmacist Alexandre Deulofeu. The next “trolley” prepared by the inventors of 1-O will come here. They will do it again. Millenarianism always has an audience and always sells and, in this sense, we Catalans are made of good stuff and have a proven ability to swallow balls, especially if they are quadri-barred and ‘Estelada’.
https://www.eltriangle.eu/es/2023/11/21/lo-volveran-a-hacer/
Gabriel Colomé: “They were insurrectional days”
The doctor in Political Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and graduate in Information Sciences, Gabriel Colomé, analyzed the causes of the turbulent Catalan situation in the book La Cataluña Insurgente (Ediciones Carena). “My feeling was one of deep sadness and desolation when I saw how Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction came true: the tyranny of the majority,” says Colomé, creator of the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO) of the Generalitat, an organization that he directed between 2005 and 2011.
“A tyranny – he adds – that did not comply with the democratic minimums of respect for the opposition.” Gabriel Colomé believes that those “insurrectional” days marked “the beginning of the end of the processism.”
He confesses that he watched with “sadness and desolation” how “a parliamentary majority, not a social one, blew up the Constitution and the Statute and placed itself outside the Rule of Law.”
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