Josep Miró i Ardèvol / 19 November 2020
The 14-F elections are transitional, not because they are not important, but because everything old is exhausted, and the new is not yet present.
Little will change the day after the elections for the vast majority of citizens of this country. And the thing is that the scenario is no longer the same as that of the last 8 years. The pandemic has accelerated it.
Independence as a concrete political objective has passed away, to that of utopian sentiments. The “decade” has thus been fulfilled. Now it already belongs to limbo along with other similar categories, such as the old convergent “national plenitude”.
ERC, which defined itself as the independence party par excellence, has returned to the sources and has become the crutch of the PSOE-UP. Now it is the same as it has been almost always, a Spanish Republican party.
The one that was JxCat, in the CDC entourage, has been divided into three. PDECAT and the PNC defend the same with nuances: a referendum agreed with the state as a way to independence; that is to say never. They keep more or less alive a feeling that has no political translation. And the third, the most important and the one that stayed with the name of JxCat has a leader, Puigdemont, who is not running as a candidate for the presidency because he prefers to be a deputy in Europe, and one of the two candidates to head the list, Damià Calvet, convergent of the old school, campaigns by speaking of management and that independence is a matter of a generation; In other words, we will talk in a few years – how many?
And if the independence movement has repositioned and mainly feeds the Sánchez-Iglesias alliance, it no longer makes any sense to want to form alternative blocs to them, justifying electoral lists that are strange in their incompatible heterogeneity.
And attention! because now that it is already evident that the utopia of independence is only an artifact to justify power and money for some to good people, the alleged alternative is situated on the same plane, avoiding tackling real problems; it does the same as the independence movement in the opposite symmetry.
The serious and difficult problems that we have today are different. What is fundamental is the crisis derived from the current party system: the partitocracy, which governs everything and which lives outside the needs of the people and the demands of the current situation, and which, in any case, only attends to them subsidiary to their factional interests and not as a priority: Every day that passes they place more of the burden on the shoulders of the people.
Why:
- Public administrations do not work, neither that of the Generalitat, nor that of the state. Meanwhile, the misery is in charge of the parishes, Caritas and Food Banks, because the collapsed administrations do not make the money flow, in addition to being scarce, to the needy.
- Despite the time that has elapsed and the harshness of the first wave, in Spain we still do not have a reliable system for monitoring and controlling positive cases and quarantines. In this situation the maximum pressure falls on the population and the economy, curfew at 10pm, business closings, municipal confinements. The list of medieval measures is long and repeated. And it is so because at the least they lose the ability to control, they act late and badly. The result is the privatization of the costs of the great crisis.
- The scandals occur at such a rate that one makes forget the other, from the situation of the prosecution and justice, by leading the world ranking of deaths, the behavior of parties in Congress and the uselessness of the Parliament of Catalonia, a country that can even do without its president for months and nothing happens here, while regional MPs charge transfer expenses that do not exist and that they do not have to justify.
- When the axis of shared reflection should be a clear and concrete resumption plan, everything remains in the dark because the leaders of those who govern will decide it in agreement with the pressure groups.
A single very tragic example sums up all the misdeeds: in Catalonia, a perfectly inept regional ministers, judging by his results, Chakir El Homrani Lesfar, remains impassive in office, while in the Spanish government, vice-president Pablo Iglesias, responsible for services Social Security has nothing to say or correct, on the surplus of 40,000 deaths of dependent people, 36% more than expected, 12,000 of which correspond to Catalonia. All of this is a scandal that he does not deserve.
Catalonia continues to need the Catalanism that it had in its irruption in the political system of the early twentieth century in Spain, a renewing and regenerating force of Catalan and Spanish politics that, at the same time, ensured self-government and culture. A culture, by the way, that in 2019, emerging from the crisis and without a pandemic, only dedicated 0.8% of its budget. It is an example, and no less, of the corruption of ideals: they spend more on advertising and cooperative communication than on culture.
There cannot be a new current and renewed version of Catalanism if it is not regenerative. Wanting to bridge the gap with a socialist alliance to make a joint list is as if the Lliga de Cambó i Prat, instead of forging the party, had formed a coalition with the party in power, whether they were conservative or liberal. Thus Catalanism would never have existed. We do not need more hunched over people, but a regenerative force at the service of society, which will liquidate, neither the transition, nor the Constitution – two most valuable realities – but the partitocracy that destroys and damages us.
14-F We need to make a new fire.
There cannot be a new current and renewed version of Catalanism if it is not regenerating.
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