CATALONIA BURIES ITS REVOLUTION
Xosé Hermida, 11 August 2024, Barcelona
Image: The former Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, greets the new ‘president’ Salvador Illa, this Saturday.MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI | Video: EPV
On the ashes of the ‘procés’, Salvador Illa’s PSC emerges as the new “party of order” with broad social support but a complex political puzzle to solve.
Salvador Illa took office yesterday as president of the Generalitat and opened a new stage full of uncertainties, but with one certainty: the pro-independence revolt of the last decade has come to an end. Carles Puigdemont himself, in a message broadcast from Waterloo, acknowledged that a new phase has begun in Catalan politics. The same impression is also conveyed by social, business and trade union forces, interviewed by EL PAÍS. Junts, Convergència’s heir, has been left with almost no institutional power. And the PSC has taken its place as the central force in the Catalan political system. “The party of order”, as one banker defined it. Illa’s leadership and Pedro Sánchez’s policies have brought about the change. Independence is still alive, but its rupturist bet has been momentarily shelved.
The businessman, a highly influential figure in Barcelona’s social life, has gone in for a long dissection of the ups and downs of a decade of turbulent Catalan politics. To conclude, he leaves subtleties aside and uses the crudest language. “The business world has had enough”, he sums up. He pauses briefly and expands on the statement: “People are up to their balls… The pro-independence people are up to their balls!
Similar things, in fact, can even be heard from the mouths of some ERC MPs or members of the critical sector of Junts. “What we need now is four years of a boring government”, says, with a touch of irony, another interlocutor with long experience in business and the post-convergence world. And nothing better for this than a man who has made boredom his banner. Salvador Illa, who with his premeditated calmness emerged unscathed from the worst pandemic in a century and now relies on the same recipe to confront the most demonic political situation in democratic Spain. Determined to undertake what another prominent Catalan financier defines as “abandoning the politics of emotions and dedicating himself once and for all to management”. A contrast that hovered over the investiture debate in Parliament on Thursday. While the leader of the PSC promised to put the concern for material things back in the foreground, the spokesman for Junts, Albert Batet, kept going on and on about the ‘conflict’, without a single allusion to the economy, health or housing.
The sun was already beginning to scorch Barcelona at eight o’clock in the morning on that Thursday and next to the Arc de Triomf, built in the Parc de la Ciutadella for the Universal Exhibition of 1888, the first ‘esteladas’ were flying. It was the place chosen to honour the return of Carles Puigdemont, which was intended to be triumphant and ended in a farce, embarrassing to the point of ridicule for the Mossos d’Esquadra and disconcerting for many of the ex-president’s followers. There, the reign of emotions still prevailed, embodied in images such as that of the woman who burst into tears because she could not get close to him when he emerged from an alleyway next to Trafalgar Street, where he had been waiting for more than half an hour, undisguised, for the senior members of Junts, with the president of the Parliament, Josep Rull, at the head. In the days of ‘proces’ euphoria, such an act would have attracted a large crowd. On this scorching August morning the attendees numbered around 3,500, most of them people of retirement age, albeit youthful-looking in their protest T-shirts or draped in their ‘esteladas’ as a cape. In the early afternoon, when the social networks were already buzzing with memes about Puigdemont’s escape and the investiture debate was progressing, a couple of septuagenarians with a sign against the ERC’s “shameful pact” with the socialists stood alone in front of the entrance gate to the Parliament.
Illa’s investiture has constituted, in the widespread opinion of politicians and social forces, the final nail in the coffin of the procés already sculpted in last May’s elections. During the parliamentary debate, only the leader of the PP, Alejandro Fernández, refuted this idea, arguing that the pacts with ERC for an economic agreement that would take Catalonia out of the common system of regional funding represent the beginning of “another procés, albeit renewed and remodelled”.
Puigdemont also insisted in a recorded message yesterday that the “procès will only end with independence”. But he immediately admitted: “What is clear is that a certain phase has ended”. A phase characterised, according to him, by “a certain way of doing things, with organised civil society alongside the political forces of the entire pro-independence spectrum”. A way of putting a definitive end to that sort of revolution in which up to two million Catalans were involved and which led to the institutional disobedience of their leaders. What they called the “revolució dels somriures [smiles]” or, from a more realistic perspective, the “dress rehearsal of a revolt”, as defined in a 2019 book by journalist and now ERC deputy in Congress Francesc-Marc Àlvaro. The adventure that the then president Artur Mas undertook in 2012 in pursuit of an independence that he himself had described years earlier as a “medieval” project and that the patriarch Jordi Pujol always dismissed as a chimera that would never be accepted by the Spanish state. “This does not mean that independence is going to disappear or cease to have its electoral expression,” warns a former nationalist now in the PSC. “What is over is the politics of words and grandiloquent gestures”.
The pro-Catalonian process was the result of a mutation that led classical Catalan nationalism to take on a pro-independence programme, an almost marginal option for decades. Its decline has to do with another, less drastic and spectacular mutation: the conversion of the PSC, under Illa and Pedro Sánchez from La Moncloa, into the force that has taken centre stage in Catalan politics. In the days of wine and roses of Pujolism, CiU was said to be the ‘pal de paller’ [literally, the haystack stick, the keystone, in a free translation] of the Catalan political system. Its drift towards uncompromising pro-independence, even alongside an anti-capitalist force like the CUP, alienated the CiU from the Catalan political system and alienated the support of business and sectors of the conservative middle classes. Today, its major institutional powers are the Provincial Council of Girona and the Mayor’s Office of Sant Cugat del Vallès (100,000 inhabitants).
Far from the strength it once had under Pujolism, the PSC accumulates the greatest institutional power and has inherited that privileged position that allows it to attract votes from the centre-right to the centre-left, to be the favourite of a large part of the business community – “the party of order”, as one banker defined it – and the interlocutor of the trade unions and the parties to its left. A great advantage for Illa, but also a potential problem. His tight investiture – he won just 68 seats short of an absolute majority – has relied on his left, ERC and Comunes. And with the latter he has agreed on issues that have not gone down well in the world of money: the maintenance of wealth and inheritance taxes, as well as the renunciation of the Hard Rock macro-casino. In exchange, the Commons have assumed that the socialists will continue to defend the expansion of El Prat airport, which they reject for environmental reasons and which the business community considers unrenounceable and would like to see approved with the support of Junts and the PP.
In the leadership of Catalunya en Comú there is great satisfaction with the programmatic agreement, although without taking anything for granted: “We will be vigilant, we do not know what Illa we are going to find. Until now this has been a very conservative PSC, far from Maragall’s party”.
The trade unions have also welcomed the content of the pacts, but, because of the same mistrust about the new president’s intentions, they would welcome an extension of the Government to its parliamentary allies in order to reinforce the left-wing profile. Putting an end to political instability is not enough, stresses Javier Pacheco, secretary general of the CC OO: “Catalonia has had many years of stability and this has not served to solve our serious social problems. What we need are new policies”.
What most worries the rest of Spain – the possibility of granting Catalonia a special financial regime – is one of the issues that arouses most consensus internally. At the investiture, only the popular Fernández spoke out against it, denouncing the attempt to establish a de facto confederal model by avoiding the necessary constitutional reform. This is the basis of his opinion that a new procés has begun.
A minority sector in Junts considers Puigdemont a liability
The trade unions would welcome Illa extending his government to ERC and the commons.
Moreover, in Catalonia, one can hear almost identical statements from the mouth of the head of a fund manager, from a leader of the Common Front or from a trade unionist.
They all repeat the idea of an under-financed community with great social needs and pockets of poverty, far, they say, from the cliché of the opulent, privileged and unsupportive Catalonia, “the miser of the Christmas story”, as Pacheco, of the CCOO, puts it.
For the time being, scepticism reigns over the viability of this kind of concert, still poorly defined in the agreements between the PSC and the ERC. One of the principles on which there is the greatest consensus is that of preserving the so-called ordinality, i.e. that each community should have the same position in the ranking of what it contributes (Catalonia is third) as in that of what it receives per inhabitant (13th). Joaquim Coello, businessman, former president of the port of Barcelona, one of the mediators who in the autumn of 2017 tried to avoid a total clash and today a defender of the benefits that Sánchez’s policy of détente has brought to Catalonia, “regardless of what his motives may have been”. Coello sees it possible to satisfy Catalan demands without harming anyone else, as long as the government makes an economic effort. The model would be extended to the seven communities that would benefit most: Catalonia (which would gain 6 billion), Andalusia, Madrid, Valencia, Murcia, Castile-La Mancha and the Balearic Islands. The rest would remain as it is. The bill would be paid by the central state, which would have to contribute, according to his calculations, 25 billion euros over five years.
Among all the uncertainties, one stands out whose resolution will remain in the hands of the man from Waterloo. It is one of those paradoxes of politics: when Junts has the least influence in Catalonia, it is the most decisive in Madrid. In its hands remains the key that can sustain or overthrow Sánchez’s government. Among the people waiting for Puigdemont’s arrival on Thursday, a woman shouted to Junts’ spokeswoman in Congress, Míriam Nogueras:
-Míriam, now we have to say no to everything in Congress!
-We do,” she replied.
Leaders such as Puigdemont himself and his secretary general, Jordi Turull, have been ambiguous in recent days. They insist on demanding from the government something as difficult to imagine as measures to prevent judges from blocking the amnesty. In his fleeting speech in Barcelona, the ex-president avoided any criticism of the Executive and focused on a discourse shared by many Catalans, including some who deplore the attitude of Junts, in order to attack the Supreme Court: “A country where the laws of amnesty do not amnesty has a problem of a democratic nature”.
Puigdemont’s escape from Barcelona has not left Puigdemont’s name in a good place within the pro-independence movement. Even among those who came to receive him, the most critical say they feel they have been used and censure the blow dealt to the image of the Mossos, the most refined example of self-government for many Catalans. This resentment was evident on Friday in the appearance of the general commissioner of the force, Eduard Sallent, who stopped giving the fugitive the usual treatment of “president” to reduce it to a simple “Mr Puigdemont”. A sector of Junts that once opposed the departure of the government longs to recover the model of the old Convergència and increasingly considers Puigdemont a burden. But they themselves admit that they are in a minority and that the change will take time to mature. Like so many other things in Catalonia. As one business leader stresses: “The procés is dead, but the post-procés is still alive”.
https://elpais.com/espana/2024-08-11/cataluna-entierra-su-revolucion.html
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