José Antonio Zarzalejos – 21/03/2020
The political, social and economic priorities have taken a Copernican turn. Everything that seemed dramatic, difficult, and distressing a few weeks ago now resembles an anecdote. Miserable characters like Clara Ponsatí (“From Madrid to Heaven!”) do not even provoke outrage, but only contempt. Obsessions like those of Joaquim Torra to close Catalonia by passing a gesture of alleged sovereignty for a security measure, do not provoke irritation but indifference.
Criticism of the state of alarm for “invasion of powers” or “an undercover 155” and the alleged intention of the Government of Spain to “infect Catalonia” are heard as rain when it falls, but they already accredit him as the most disloyal politician when he has declared them to the BBC and reported them to EU leaders. Torra is a sectarian man with no possible remedy. The crisis in Catalonia, so creepingly posed even in such dramatic moments, has lost all that disturbing character it once had. The change in its perception is radical, complete and, surely, irreversible.
No one in Madrid, or anywhere else in the country, talks about the “dialogue table”; nobody is interested in whether the prisoners leave or enter the prison and if they do so under this or that rule; it is not foreseen in any agenda that the Penal Code is reformed because the attention, the efforts of the Government and the energies of the officials are focused on the fact that the General Administration of the State, under minima, continues to provide essential services.
Without Budgets
There will also be no Budgets, so Gabriel Rufián can avoid the warnings about the legislature and avoid the ‘performances’ of his speeches in the Congress. President Pedro Sánchez has already announced that this year there will be no public accounts –ERC is left without resources of conviction– and those of 2021 will be “reconstruction budgets”.
Nor does it matter when the Catalan elections will take place. There is no approximate date for the Basque and Galician deferrals. Still less if the paralysis of the procedural terms will delay ‘sine die’ the sentence of the appeal of President of the Generalitat. It does not matter if he remains at the head of the Catalan Government or someone else replaces him. Although anyone would be better than him. Nothing is as it seemed. Nationalism – all nationalisms – has been pulverized by the colossal scale of the pandemic, by the devastating danger of its possible consequences, by the lapidary phrases of Emmanuel Macron (“it is war”) and Angela Merkel (“the greatest challenge since the Second World War “).
We are in a survival trance in which the sense of solidarity, the spirit of collaboration, closeness to the vulnerable, civility and the exercise of citizenship prevail. Whoever departs from that line of conduct that is in tune with collective needs, stays in the gutter, is not listened to, attended to, or considered. That is why Joaquim Torra, with his essentialisms and his obsessions, with that recalcitrant nationalism that makes a suffocating moral trifle transparent, resembles a Martian in today’s world. An alien. A character transported from the past to the present.
Europe ignores
In Europe the Carles Puigdemont ‘et alli’ can roam as much as they want. Here no one flinches at his fate. The European Parliament is set to kick off this week. Let them do whatever they want. What matters to us is saving lives; contain contagion; protect the most vulnerable; demonstrate that we are depositaries of decades and decades of learning in civility.
The covid-19 pandemic (there is a history lesson in every tragedy) shows that the globalization of even the disease has defeated nationalism and, surely, also populism, and that we are entering a new era of universalizing behavior. Identity is no longer what it was, but has been reformulated in the most fiercely human sense: in the strength of unity and in the weakness of introspection.
The current government is no longer a progressive coalition, PSOE and Unidos Podemos. Is an Executive of management, of national salvation, of emergency. It has deferred all his plans and abandoned all but one program – rebuilding. It is not the end of history, but of this history of borders, customs and sheepfolds. We are in anonymous applause at 8pm each day to the healthcare staff; in domestic confinement; in fear and hope.
Feats in front of flags
The flags – as if by enthusiasm – have stopped moving. Now we are brought to tears by the exploits of healthcare citizens who work in precarious conditions, who risk their health, all those who, on silent mornings of confinement, idle the machinery of a society that does not stop. The Army that disinfects El Prat and the port of Barcelona.
Someone should be preparing Catalan independence for a strong ‘shock’: its purpose has long ended, its intention has become even more unintelligible, history has turned the corner and nothing of the above is worth anything, not even the epic from a few months ago it is already in force and will not be again, there is no mystique in self-absorption, but in solidarity. There is no more homeland than that of belonging to wounded humanity.
This issue of sovereignty, independence, “us” versus “them”, of “our” versus “others”, is over. Reality has become prosaic and warlike: it kills us, impoverishes us and unites us in lament. There will no longer be any meetings Sánchez with Torra, after the unequivocal disqualification of Margarita Robles, expressly agreed with Moncloa. Citizens would not consent. The President of the Generalitat has crossed all limits. It has gone beyond all political decencies. The Catalans – everyone – deserved better. And, according to the CEO poll on Friday, they seem to know it.
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