Catalonia is an ammunition dump about to explode

02/06/2020

President Quim Torra faces a triple crisis that threatens his continuity at the head of the Generalitat. On the one hand, the terrifying health and economic effects caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, which have devastated the business fabric and triggered unemployment in Catalonia. On the other, the revolt that has spread through rural areas and mountain regions against the new law creating the Agency for Natural Heritage and Biodiversity promoted by Councilor Damià Calvet. And thirdly, the outbreak of labor and union outrage that has caused the announced closure of the three factories that the Japanese multinational Nissan has in the Barcelona metropolitan area.

This triple crisis is systemic. It unites, at the same time and for different reasons, the employers’ associations Fomento del Trabajo and Pimec and the main unions (CC.OO., UGT and CGT). It makes visible a common front in which PSC and ERC coincide, leaving the post-convergents of JxCat cornered. It speaks, at the same time, the Catalan of the regions of the interior Catalonia – historically marginalized by the ‘Barcelona-centric’ power – and the Spanish of the working-class neighborhoods of the metropolitan periphery, victims of the social inequality imposed by neoliberal capitalism.

From the Catalonia fractured by the secessionist adventure and severely punished by the coronavirus, a powerful protest movement is emerging that spreads throughout the territory, as we move forward in the lack of confidence and people can move on the street. But also, at the same time, a massive desire for regeneration in the way of doing politics and managing power and public resources.

President Quim Torra is in the wrong place, at the most inopportune moment. The divorce between JxCat and ERC already seems irreversible, after the decision of the Republicans to abstain in the Congress of Deputies to facilitate the new extension of the state of alarm that President Pedro Sánchez advocates.

Mayors, farmers, ranchers, forest owners, rural small businessmen, employers ‘organizations … clamp down on unions and left-wing parties that defend workers’ rights when denouncing the clamorous inefficiency and erratic politics  directed by the President of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, governed remotely by the guest of Waterloo. The situation is, objectively, unsustainable and it only takes the “click” that triggers the necessary and urgent call for elections in Catalonia to face, with a strong and powerful government, the reconstruction stage that, together, we have to activate next. Quim Torra must understand that he has become a hindrance.

https://www.eltriangle.eu/es/opinion/cataluna-es-un-polvorin-a-punto-de-estallar_106225_102.html