Antonio Franco 12 May 12 2021
Conference between the State and the autonomous communities on Historical Memory in February 2019. / JOSÉ LUIS ROCA
The Covid has lifted the shirt to our political system and has shown that it was very poorly defined and poorly developed
The Covid has vehemently reminded us that Spain is not a State like France or Italy, that the different model – not to call it original – of the State of Autonomies exists, is real, and that beyond its successes, complexities and imperfections it does not affect only to feelings, rights, duties of each one of the communities but also to the life and sometimes the death of the citizens of all of them. In no other European country has it been so difficult to organize and manage the fight against the pandemic, although also in none of them the level of toxicity, radicalism, Cainite verbalism, daily demagoguery and immaturity of politicians was as great as here before the COVID , and has grown so much during this challenge.
We must recognize something: the Covid has lifted the shirt to our political system and has shown that it was very poorly defined and poorly developed. From the beginning, when we had a first struggle between the central and regional administrations over who was in the face of public opinion responsible of the unpopular measures and the final responsibilities for what was not known how to be done well. The obligatory reminder to the central government that Spain is not a legally centralist country led to a decentralization that soon showed both its lack of maturity and its vulnerability to the gusty demagogies that our very weak political class continually launched in all directions. The current final fringes that we live, with the dance of different decisions and proliferation of equal unknowns in the autonomous superior courts and in the general national courts, have fallen very badly on a puzzled public opinion, already fed up, and convinced that here they do not know neither command us nor coordinate us democratically.
Several pieces of evidence have emerged. The democratic transition was excellent in many ways, but it was deliberately left unfinished by fear, cowardice, and misconceptions. Then, the work of polishing both the improvised autonomic model and our instruments of law has been done little and completely badly due to partisanship and the apathy of those who had to carefully legislate what had been poorly defined. The worst thing is not that we have reached 2021 without the appropriate Senate and without ordinary mechanisms of cooperation and joint work between autonomies, but that PSOE and PP people have not even dared to recognize the evident multi-nationality of Spain or to what extent it was logical to preserve certain uniformity and to what extent it was convenient to underline the differences – historical or operational – that had to be preserved. Given this, it is now impossible to postpone that, in addition to facing great current problems, both the Spanish State and the autonomies face the need to theoretically and practically solve the deficits of our unfinished model of decentralization, and do not do it with scissors but with squares, compasses and rulers. Failure to do so would be tantamount to thinking that the Spanish pit can overcome the deep decline in which it has already entered simply with more false smiles and grunts, which is what we already carry behind our backs.
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