The government of Catalonia acts as an anti-system and half of the Spanish government as an opposition

Vicente Serrano, 12 March 2021

Member of Alternativa  Ciudadana Progresista and author of  “The real value of the  vote” 

Hasél: the retrograde left and the wild secessionism

The failure of secessionism at the polls is a reality, no matter how much it claims it has won. Almost half of the census, some 2.5 million Catalans, did not go to vote; of them, a million or a little more had already stayed at home in the regional elections of 2017, and the rest have been lost in halves by secessionists and non-secessionists, misnamed constitutionalists. But the latter, as a cage of crickets, are unable to show a joint position or proposal.

Secessionism – cheered on by an interested power – has brought all its puppies out of the CDRs (Comitès de Defensa de la República), along with neo-fascist and / or neo-anarchist elements and spiced up with mindless LOGSE (educational system 1990-2006) (and I say LOGSE with all the criticism towards the responsibility of those who have governed Spain since the Transition). To think that it is a popular movement in favor of the right to freedom of expression is galloping naivety.

National-secessionism is very frustrated, almost 37% of its electorate has abandoned them, support for secession – less than 27% – is the lowest since 2006, less than 9N. And its vaunted 80% neither exceeds 31% if we add all the votes of En Comú Podem,

And that frustration has transferred itself to the street and has been cheered by the institutions of the Catalan government and by part of the Government of Spain. We are in a Kafkaesque situation. Catalan government acts as an anti-system and half of the Spanish government as an opposition. Talking about sewers of the state when you have the key to the sewers sounds like a Fujimori self-coup.

From brainy pseudo-Marxist positions we can tear our clothes on the frustration of a youth without a future. If that were the case, the world would be in a pre-revolutionary situation and it is not the case. It is only necessary to see the excessive reaction before an alleged punishment of freedom of expression: indiscriminate burning of urban furniture, destruction in shopping centers and banks and, above all, looting, not precisely of basic necessities, no; branded.

Hasél, or rather Pablo Rivadulla, son of a corrupt businessman and grandson of a Francoist military, apart from not having worked in his whole life, reinvents himself as a pseudo-revolutionary with an apparently radical speech and has several convictions for exalting terrorism, threats and injuries. Freedom of expression in Spain is guaranteed, I can call Pablo Rivadulla an imbecile or a pro-terrorist without fear of being imprisoned.

Violent forms show this anger because Catalan society has not followed them, because something is beginning to crack in the secessionist hegemony since the beginning of the Procés . It is the beginning of the regression, not by success of the nonexistent constitutionalism, but by its own merits. The continued tension generated for years by the national-Catalanism, even today, provokes a detachment from the separatist dèria (madness).

The problem to return to the imperfect bipartisanship, which the electoral system determines, is the disintegration of the right with the emergence of Vox, the internal crisis of the PP unable to overcome its corrupt heritage with a burdened leader and the stigma in the Basque Country and Catalonia where PNV and JxCat (formerly CiU) occupy the right segment.

On the left, the PSOE aims to recover at the expense of Podemos by integrating it into the Government and letting it getting off-key as much as they want, highlighting the lack of coherence with its institutional position. In Catalonia the recovery comes not only from power, but also from an anti-nationalist electorate that has abandoned C’s due to stage fright four years ago and the ideological lurch to the right of its centrality, including a leadership crisis.

There continues to be a political vacuum on the left of the PSOE that Podemos can never fill: that of a radical left on social issues and consistently anti-nationalist. A distant void that has yet to be filled and that becomes difficult to build while the electorate lurches between a right-wing anti-nationalism (C’s) and a nationalist “left” (Podemos / En Comú Podem).