Álex Sàlmon, 7 September 2017
The ‘former vice president’ Oriol Junqueras and the ‘former president’ Carles Puigdemont, in the parliamentary chamber, in a file photo from 2017 / QUIQUE GARCÍA (EFE)
We are talking about the two saddest days of democracy in Catalonia. The damage was so deep that the damage has not yet been observed. Not even the independence movement itself was aware. Nor is it now. During those September 6 and 7, many lived blinded by the objective of disconnection, the hiding of some ‘tupperware’ ballot boxes (total success) and the 1-O.
But that collateral damage carved out its next steps. At that time no one could interpret it that way. The effervescence of the project washed away any iota of intelligence. And everything was possible. Even changing the rules of the game without the necessary majorities.
Some still remember those events as a few days of success. Breaking the wall of an insensitive, outdated and corrupt state. In hero stories there is room for any argument to make the princess or prince fall at their feet. But fiction is just that: an illusion. The ‘procés’ began to self-destruct those two days. There was no way to get it. Even one MP from the more obvious leftist party (Coscubiela) seduced the MP from the more orderly right (Albiol) in defense of parliamentary exercise, whose responsibility is always to vote for laws built under the parameters of the rules of the game.
It was a sad and cynical parliamentary day. Of a supine falsehood inspired by a shameless strategy that allowed to take the floor so that no one could say that everything was a blow to legality. Catalan democracy still has the smack in the face with its four fingers embedded in its face as a reminder of some unfortunate events.
Every day there are more who rode on that runaway horse and look at the ground when they remember it. There is still no acknowledgment of guilt. In many, there never will be. But when the world looked at it, if it ever did, at a process that had the sensation of to be so protagonist of ‘processism’, to be so navel of the world, it must not have liked that. Not even the Flemish Parliament itself, with a very elaborate parliamentary architecture. Not those from Flanders. You see.
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