19th December 2020
Image: The former president of the Generalitat Quim Torra, with the banner behind his back.
It is urgent that politics work again in Catalonia after too many years subscribed solely to symbolism and shouting.
The Parliament of Catalonia will be automatically dissolved tomorrow, Monday. Twenty-four hours later, the acting president, Pere Aragonès, will sign the decree calling for elections. It will be the final goodbye to a lost legislature, marked basically and from beginning to end by the partisan interests of some of the leaders of the political formations on which the government majority has rested.
Vaudeville has lasted for three years and has weakened the prestige of Catalan institutions. Those within the government who tried to force their seams have prevailed to force them to continue serving the interests of a symbolism as histrionic as it is sterile that on too many occasions has passed in front of the serious difficulties and challenges that Catalan society as a whole is currently facing.
The legislature will be marked for history by the presidency of Quim Torra and his subsequent disqualification. Torra behaved while in office as a pro-independence activist and not as a president. His governmental legacy, supervised from beginning to end by Carles Puigdemont, will appear in a place of honor in any encyclopedia of political nonsense.
But to attribute it only to Quim Torra would be to confuse the part with the whole. The Cainite struggle that JXCAT and ERC have maintained for a long time, and which is currently at a point of maximum festering, has also turned the Parlament table into a playground. Not even the pandemic and its tragic consequences have been reason enough to put an end to mistrust between partners and their growing disloyalty.
Catalonia cannot afford another legislature with its institutions hijacked by party interests. Regardless of what the election results are, all political formations should conspire to understand that there is another way of doing politics. It is imperative that once and for all stop delving into the division of Catalans and that the institutions, which belong to all, work on forging a common project from which no citizen feels excluded.
This is the only way for Catalonia to face with a minimum of guarantees the multiple challenges that the immediate future poses for it and that with the pandemic have acquired greater urgency.
We must return to the policy that has the citizen and their well-being as the driving force behind all decisions. It is necessary to return to the most basic consensus so that political activity ceases to be a conversation between the deaf. Ultimately, it is urgent that politics work again in Catalonia after too many years subscribed solely to symbolism and shouting.
A part of this work is not solely the responsibility of the Catalan parties. The current majority of Congress, together with a new way of doing things in Catalonia from the mandate that emerges from the polls on February 14, should work together in the definitive opening of a scenario that allows us to embrace a new political time. Let’s hope that the term that is ending is also an end point for inoperation and division. It is time to return to responsibility.
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