In politics, the vacuum does not exist, but this does not necessarily imply that if a moderate party disappears, for example, the space it occupied is filled by another equally moderate. This is what is happening in Catalonia after the blasting of the Convergència Democràtica and, incidentally, its alliance with the Democratic Union, the CiU coalition. In a space where for years moderation and gradualism reigned, intransigence and maximalism now predominate.
CiU’s trajectory until 2012 may be more or less liked, it can even be considered negative, but it was characterized by a permanent commitment to moderation and negotiation. Where Miquel Roca, Joaquim Molins, Xavier Trias and Josep Antoni Duran Lleida lavished themselves as tireless negotiators for decades, there is now a conglomerate incapable of something as sensible as endorsing the declaration of the state of alarm to face an epidemic that today 27,104 lives had already been claimed in Spain, 5,692 of them in Catalonia.
The moderation that is now missing in the practice of the PDeCAT and JuntsxCatalunya is not that related to the program, but rather to the attitude in relation to the rest of the political forces. A party may have objectives in its program that others may consider totally unacceptable, even radical or extreme, and they may be. In fact, this is what happens with independence, although not only with it. But decades of recent experience demonstrate that this should not prevent you from reaching agreements on many issues if the program is accompanied by a constructive, negotiating, moderate attitude. This attitude is what the successors of Convergence have not inherited.
They have their reasons for being angry with the world, and in particular with the Spanish world, you can think, if you take into account the domestic situation of the orphans of the pujolist universe at this time. Or even angry with themselves, since some of their main ills, which have led to the party’s self-dissolution, are entirely endogenous.
The week in which the JxCat deputies opposed the third extension of the state of alarm coincided with the ratification by the National Court of the prison sentences for illegal financing of Convergence through the Palau de la Música during the years of government by Jordi Pujol.
The outcome of the trial is awaited for the so-called 3% plot, also for illegal financing of the party in the Artur Mas stage. And at any time, the President of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, may be subject to the ratification of a disqualification sentence, which should eventually lead to the fall of his government.
His predecessor, Carles Puigdemont, remains a refugee in Brussels, now as a MEP, but persecuted by the same court that has condemned and imprisoned almost the entire previous Catalan Government for the frustrated declaration of independence in 2017.
With this scorching backdrop, it is quite logical that negative feelings proliferate in the political universe of the pro-independence right. For them, counts little or nothing, that their current adverse situation is the result, first of all, of their own mistakes and political nonsense. Among what has emerged from the remains of Catalan centrism is a nationalist maximalism in which figures move, especially through social networks and some digital media, to spread rage, sectarianism, hatred of the political adversary, ethnicism and xenophobia.
A recent example is the campaign against the writer Javier Cercas. But it is the same one that Joan Coscubiela has been suffering since 2017, and so many others that the new agitators of the new independentist right point to as guilty of the infeasibility of their own chimera.
The expansion of these elements in the political space of pujolism hinders the recovery of the pactism that previously characterized it, poisons the political climate and makes it difficult to heal the wounds from which Catalan nationalism has been bleeding since 2010.
They have become a drag on the ERC , the other party of the Government of the Generalitat. The republicans promote a political disinflammation with the aim, precisely, of opening negotiations with the Government of Spain on self-government, but they are prisoners of the alliance with a PDeCAT and JxCat dominated by the maximalists, who torpedo all their efforts, accuse them of treason and sometimes drag them into their positions. Every day they find it more uncomfortable, but they have no alternative in the current parliamentary balance of forces.
https://cat.elpais.com/cat/2020/05/13/opinion/1589382526_990548.html
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