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Home » Content » Emergencies: Catalonia has fallen into the hands of a very particular ruling class for a decade
The process is over. Citizens need to trust the institutions again: the Parliament, the Government, their police, their media.. After a few hasty years, the rush now is to have a government that governs, that does politics and is not distracted by new stories and the fantasy of useless institutional inventions. Above all, to tell the truth to the citizens.There will be no amnesty, at most pardons. There will be no self-determination, if any, a negotiating table and statutory and perhaps constitutional reforms that will have to go to the polls. There is a need to be vaccinated quickly and effectively. It is necessary to invest very well to recover the role of Catalonia as a Spanish economic engine. The results of the polls allow at least two formulas of government, both with ERC as the central force. It is certainly difficult to expect a little civic courage and political intelligence from those who have not shown anything so far. Nothing seems more normal than the long chain of irresponsibility and frivolity of the last ten years now culminating in another display of frivolous irresponsibility. But perhaps this time the citizens of Catalonia will no longer forgive.

Lluís Bassets,

11 April 2021

Aragonès last November 21 in Parliament.

Catalonia has fallen into the hands of a very particular ruling class for a decade. After a few hasty years in which we had to set a date and limits because it was not possible to wait another minute to solve the challenge that history had subjected us to, we now find ourselves installed in a perpetual postponement, a suspended time, without haste, without government, perhaps even with an electoral repeat, waiting either for a “broadening of the base” or for the opportunity of a new and unlikely “attack on the state”, the fashionable expression.

Empty words, unrelated to the real emergencies visible to any citizen who is not blinded. Just when we are in a real hurry: stop the pandemic first of all, the economic reconstruction at the same time and above all the recovery of the prestige of Catalonia and the functioning of its institutions of self-government, abused by those who had been responsible of leading them, deviated from their responsibilities in order to meet the sectarian and partisan demands and whims of their ideological utopias.

It is necessary to avoid the traps of loneliness, which the pro-independence leaders know best, with Quim Torra at the helm: amnesty and self-determination are not goals that can be achieved, they are not even real emergencies, but the last two and more perverse lies that crown the immense castle of lies patiently erected for ten years. They serve to divert attention from the disinterest and ineptitude to govern of the entire pro-independence leadership. They try, even if they fail, to keep alive what is already dead, the procés and its varied and defunct roadmaps and false institutions, including the empty and useless legacy of October 1, the cheeky and fake Council of the Republic and the ghostly house of Waterloo.

Amnesty and self-determination are the two arms of a rupture that will not occur, mere euphemisms to signal the dream victory over the Spanish constitutional state. So much so that it was possible to culminate the procés as if the unilateral acts of 2017 had not taken place, therefore, with the implicit authorization to a repetition, by the Generalitat or any other government or entity, and to the celebration in addition of ‘a real referendum of self-determination binding and authorized by the Spanish Parliament, as in the cases of independence as a result of decolonization.

That many bona fide citizens swallow those two lies does not make them true. They wouldn’t be true even if they were a majority. Anyway, lies are not formulated in a vacuum, the reasons are there. Turning the page on the Big Nonsense, also criminally, is essential in order to tackle the emergencies: the pandemic, the economic recovery and the revitalization of the institutions. It will also be necessary, not now, for Catalan citizens to express themselves on a new political and institutional consensus regarding their self-government: the disaster of the 2006 Statute and the Constitutional ruling on it  oblige them to take to the polls a formula that cures and heals the wounds then open. It is understood, therefore, the ease for the two lies: amnesty and self-determination are the radical and chimerical proposals that express two inescapable needs, knowing that there is no possibility of obtaining them and, therefore, with the security that the business and the party of the procés will continue to benefit those who live and take advantage of it.

The rush now is to have a government that governs, that does politics and is not distracted by new stories and the fantasy of useless institutional inventions. Above all, to tell the truth to the citizens. The procés is over. There will be no amnesty, at most pardons. There will be no self-determination, if any, a negotiating table and statutory and perhaps constitutional reforms that will have to go to the polls. There is a need to be vaccinated quickly and effectively. It is necessary to invest very well to recover the role of Catalonia as a Spanish economic engine. Citizens need to trust the institutions again: the Parliament, the Government, their police, their media…

No program would have more support right now in Parliament and among the citizenry. Even within the pro-independence field. It is what ERC would want if it dared, if it were not such a submissive party. It is what even the post-Convergencia world would do if the ballot boxes had not taken its pro-independence progeny. Only the CUP, with its revolutionary theatrical purity, has all the arguments to oppose it, with the strength given to it by its ideological hegemony within independence and a capacity for leadership far above its electoral weight.

The CUP is the organization that has had the most influence and paid the least in repression on its leaders, the one that has made the most of the pro-independence operation and the one that seems most willing to continue to take it out, at the expense, of course, of maintaining misgovernment in Catalonia and instability in Spain, which is what interests them. What is not logical is that the rest of the pro-independence, especially ERC, would prefer to remain subjected to the CUP at the expense of the country’s paralysis rather than drawing the most practical and sensible conclusions from the election results.

The results of the polls allow at least two formulas of government, both with ERC as the central force. It is certainly difficult to expect a little civic courage and political intelligence from those who have not shown anything so far. Nothing seems more normal than the long chain of irresponsibility and frivolity of the last ten years now culminating in another display of frivolous irresponsibility. But perhaps this time the citizens of Catalonia will no longer forgive

it.https://cat.elpais.com/cat/2021/04/11/cultura/1618159430_376252.html

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